#2 - How large did armies get during the Last War? Again, this may not have been stated explicitly anywhere, but what impression do you have?
I remember Keith' talking about his version of the world of Eberron to be a rather compact continent with only a few million inhabitants.
Therefor the armies were 2000 soldiers max. on each side, while Thrane threw in a lot more foot soldiers.
Shortly after the death of Galifar, the armies marching on Thronehold numbered about 3000 men, right?
No opinion on #1, but in reference to #2:
I remember Keith' talking about his version of the world of Eberron to be a rather compact continent with only a few million inhabitants.
Therefor the armies were 2000 soldiers max. on each side, while Thrane threw in a lot more foot soldiers.
Shortly after the death of Galifar, the armies marching on Thronehold numbered about 3000 men, right?
From the population quotes generally given, armies of 2000-3000 men seem pitifully small. I've heard the populations of the Five Nations as being somewhere between 1.5 and 3 million people each, which is about the population of 18th century Britain. They'd be capable of fielding armies of tens of thousands of men at least, minus constructs or undead troops.
Armies of 2000-3000 men apiece are more appropriate for small city-states with populations of a few dozen thousands, not nations of several million people.
They couldn't keep this up for long. :-)
I guess you have to factor in that a lot of the countries of Khorvaire wage war for quite a while AND on multiple frontiers. With magic thrown into the mix, a 10.000 vs. 10.000 + Fireballs would kill or severly injure a lot of soldiers beyond healing - or repair for that matter.
They couldn't keep this up for long. :-)
In such a situation, tactics would simply change to accomodate the new weapons. If fireballs were available for use regularly, and were as destructive as you say, combatant armies would adjust their tactics very quickly to attempt to neutralize the destructive power of fireballs. For example, cover & concealment might become very important.
Anyways. Jaster, your perception of the duties of a General Staff is a bit restricted. GS don't just handle intelligence; they handle and coordinate almost every facet of warmaking.
Now, you have it capitalized, so I assume you mean a centralized organ at the highest echelons of military organization. Perhaps similar to the Prussian General Staff (excuse the Wikipedia link, but it seems solid enough). Granted, the Prussian/German General Staff had its problems, but that's not the point; the point is that when they had a General Staff, and the other side didn't, the Germans monkey-stomped them. The Prussian defeat in 1806 doesn't follow this, because a.) the Prussian General Staff existed only in nascent form, and b.) Berthier had, evidently, already established a stronger form of a General Staff in the Napoleonic armies.
To illustrate my point, though, take a look at the Wars of Prussian Unification. After the establishment of the Kriegsakademie, the Prussian army began instilling its officers with a more-or-less standardized doctrine and approach to warfare. Furthermore, rather than trusting that these officers will "learn as they go", they ensured that the officers were prepared from the onset to command. Rather than hoping that a genius would arise at the necessary time to make up for inept lower-echelon commanders, the Prussians ensured that those subordinate commanders would be competant, and thus lower the chances of deadly mistakes happening. Furthermore, competent lower-level command and control allows the higher echelons to concentrate on future planning and preparation.
Anyways. In the 1864 war (Denmark v. Austria and Prussia), it dragged on because the general in charge (von Wrangel) didn't take advantage of the existance of von Moltke's General Staff, and the corresponding operational and strategic advantages. So, the war dragged on, and Prussia and Austria won.
However, the better illustrations of the usefulness of a General Staff are the Austro-Prussian War of 1866. The existance of the Prussian General Staff allowed for railroad mobilization and transportation schedules that enabled Prussia to move her army of over a quarter-million men to the border, and comence offensive actions almost immediately. While the Prussian generals at Koinnigratz seemed to eschew corps- and army-level maneuvering in favor of just getting stuck in, the Battle of Konnigratz saw the Austrian army shattered.
The Franco-Prussian War provides an even better illustration of the potency of the General Staff. The Prussians moved at blinding speed at the operational and strategic levels, simply because the General Staff allowed for effective coordination, planning, and execution among large (corps and army) units.
Ahhhh, if only I hadn't lost The German Way of War.....
I'll forgo talking about lower-level staff systems. For now. Maybe if the discussion gets going....
Anyways. Before I start talking about Eberron, remember that a General Staff does more than coordinate intelligence. It also coordinates training, logistics, and planning. Only in recent years have things like public relations, computers, and whatnot been introduced to the general staff.
Now. To address the question of General Staffs in Eberron, well....I guess I'd have to say that its one of the instances where the writers of Eberron show that they Did Not Do The Research. That seems odd, seeing as they wrote the setting, but knowledge of military affairs isn't something that can be taken for granted. Given how the armies of Khorvaire performed in the Last War, and given that military developments seem to be lagging behind social and economic developments, I don't think Khorvaire has the equivilent of a General Staff. Some countries might have started developing nascent forms of General Staffs, but I cannot see any country having a GS.
Peversely enough, one of the reasons I don't see Khorvaire having General Staffs is because of the presence of House Orien. One of the main functions of GS is to coordinate logistics. Orien, being the chief provider of landbound logistics in Khorvaire, would simplify that horribly complex process, and take that burden off of a commander.
Furthermore, most (all?) of the nations of Khorvaire do not have the professional officer corps that a General Staff requires. Karrnath may be the sole exception here, with the Rekkenmark Academy, but that appears to be primairly an "undergraduate" institution, similar to West Point or Sandhurst. It only appears to have "graduate" componants, similar to the Army War College or Army Command and General Staff College, as informal institutions, in the Order of Rekkenmark. Even that, though, seems to be mostly a prestiege organization.
If Karrnath did have a General Staff, the only way I can see them not ruling the world is if it was a weak institution, or subject to infighting by the Karrnathi Warlords.
Right. I'll let you guys chew that over. I'll check back in later.
What I was saying is that I believe that a dedicated intelligence organization would imply the existence of a General Staff to whom they report. But that's kind of an unfounded assumption. I'm aware of the history of the Prussian General Staff and it's effect on Prussian military efficiency; hence why I asked, since the existence of General Staffs would greatly increase the sophistication of warfare on Khorvaire.
My initial instincts were also that they did not possess General Staffs, which explains the seeming lack of any grand strategies or any decisive military outcomes in the various campaigns undertaken by each of the Five Nations. Especially considering the distances over which the Last War must have been fought, the lack of a centralized military bureaucracy would greatly hamper any decisive action.
Actually, I know what a General Staff does (I enjoy the exposition, however). Sorry if I gave the impression they only interpret intelligence.
Its all good. But, now other people know what a General Staff does, and, as GI Joe told us, Knowing is Half The Battle. (As another poster points out in his sig, the other half is violence).
What I was saying is that I believe that a dedicated intelligence organization would imply the existence of a General Staff to whom they report. But that's kind of an unfounded assumption.
Ohh. Yeah, I thought you were just talking about intel operations in general, not the link between dedicated intel organization (like the Royal Eyes/Dark Lanterns/CIA) and the military.
With that in mind, I can still see an informal organizational structure working. Somewhat haphazardly, but hey.
My initial instincts were also that they did not possess General Staffs, which explains the seeming lack of any grand strategies or any decisive military outcomes in the various campaigns undertaken by each of the Five Nations. Especially considering the distances over which the Last War must have been fought, the lack of a centralized military bureaucracy would greatly hamper any decisive action.
Good to see we're on the same page here. The thing is, though, that von Moltke effectively ran the 1866 war and the Franco-Prussian War from the end of a telegraph wire. I think for a while, Halleck did the same. With Speaking Stones/Telegraphs, it is possible to communicate at long distances; with the Lighting Rail (and other logistical aid from House Orien), it is feasible to supply and move armies at such scale and size.
On the topic of size, though, that's always been an irritant. Again, before the Boardpocalypse, Octavius had a thread showing how sparsely populated Khorvaire was given its 3.5 ECS statistics. Even if the population figures were inflated tenfold, there were still problems, IIRC. I can't remember how the 4e ECG changed things, but I think the biggest thing was that the map scale shrank? Meh. I just recall looking at Forge of War, and calculating a Mror regiment to be 72 dwarves strong, and promptly facepalming. I don't have FoW with me, though, so someone else is welcome to do the calculations.
Nevertheless, if one country was going to have a staff system, it probably would be Karrnath. After all, Rekkenmark Academy is the premier "undergraduate" service institution in Khorvaire, similar to West Point or Sandhurst. Furthermore, with the Order of Rekkenmark, there is a group with the necessary intellectual acumen to learn/discover the skills and functionality of a staff system. Conceptually, the concept of a staff system could be born in an Order of Rekkenmark meeting, with a codified version of the staff system concept being taught as "graduate" classes at Rekkenmark. Having an academy teach "graduate" and "undergraduate" is almost exactly similar, to my knowledge, to the Prussian Kriegsakademie. Could a General Staff be Karrnath's biggest weapon in the Next War?
Nevertheless, the biggest problem I can see with Karrnath developing a staff system is the warlords. Simply put, they are too autonomous and fragmented to be controlled and directed effectively. In fact, I may go so far as to say that this fractionalization is Karrnath's biggest weakness. I can easily see warlords duplicating functional areas, withholding help, and in general politicking their way into disaster. One of the facets of Karrnath I wanted to use in my games was one warlord who ran the Office of Naval Intelligence (come on! the acronym is "ONI"!) politicking with a rival who runs another intelligence organ (or perhaps his own).
As for the other nations, none really stand out as having a possibility of having a staff system. Breland is marked by enthusiastic amateurs; they may be competant, and they may be incompetant. The same goes for Aundair, to my knowledge. Cyre didn't have much of a standing army, so I can't see them having one, and Thrane, well, just no.
I would say that one of Kaius' primary goals in preparing Karrnath for the Next War (I don't believe the hibbity about him being a proponent of peace) would be to reduce or eliminate the power of the warlords as much as he could, in order to make this sort of development possible (hell, he's a vampire; maybe he used his supernatural powers to "divine" the idea). All in all, Karrnath seems by far the best placed to actually dominate Khorvaire in any future conflict, since it makes up for it's manpower shortages with undead and is the only Nation with a nascent professional officer corps.
Yeah, but each other nation has something going for it as well, and just like Karrnath, each has something going against it ;) It is what I love about Eberron. Each DM can run the next Great War the way he wants, stick to the core setting and get a completely different result. The rulers need the PCs to deal with the downsides, placing the players right in the center of the conflict as a good politically orientated campaign should be ;)
I mean....Aundair would...use more magic. Breland would....do something new. Thrane would...pray really hard. Sure, they may be more efficient than they were in the Last War, have newer or better toys/weapons/whatever....but I cannot forsee any nation having a fundamental revolution in military affairs. That is what I see Karrnath developing a staff system and professional officer corps as.
I'd actually go further than arguing professionalization was a result of the Last War, in fact. I'd argue -- and have run -- that it predated the dissolution of Galifar, with the Rekkenmark Academy having been explicitly founded by the crown for the purpose of expunging the national parochialisms from officer-candidates while creating loyal and learned professionals to lead the imperial army. The curriculum at Rekkenmark may well given rise to a nascent general staff, too, prior to 894. Whether it did or not is dependant upon what kind of staff is being envisioned.
When the term "general staff" is bandied about, it tends to refer to one of two things. The first is the sort already covered at-length by Ogiwan, that embodied by the Prussian Great General Staff, which tasked itself with writing "solutions" to national security problems and, in the leisure of peacetime, devising all manner of plans for a wide variety of contingencies and then pigeonholing them for just such an occasion. Jarot I's paranoia would seem conducive to setting up just such an entity to make sure Galifar had a war plan for any situation: In retrospect, it's almost facepalm-worthy that he did mandate the creation of such.
The other is the more technical definition of such a staff, bereft of its German historic connotations: "[A] group of officers and enlisted personnel that provides a bi-directional flow of information between a commanding and subordinate military units," as the All-Mighty Wiki puts it. Given the immense size of Khorvaire, the distances between theaters of operation and Thronehold, and the complexities imposed when the lines-of-supply and -communication are owned and/or operated predominantly by three separate magical cartels, it seems inevitable that some manner of staff system would have had to develop to keep Galifar's armies moving and fed following the advent of the lightning rail. (It was, after all, the invention of railroads IRL that provided the major impetus for the founding of most of the modern staff colleges.) At any rate, it's conceivable to see both a general staff of the Prussian variety, along with a more traditional staff arrangement at lower echelons, arising in Galifar prior to the death of Jarot I.
Following his death and the splintering of Galifar, it would seem likely that each of the Five Nations would attempt to replicate the military institutions of the fallen imperial state, with them evolving in tune with national characters as the war progressed. Ironically, I've always rolled Cyre as having the most adept and robust staff system, while Karrnath remained the most resistant to it. The latter because I tend to mate the Napoleonic marshal system to Wilhelmine constitutionalism: Between Kaius, his War Minister, the Military Cabinet, general staff, knightly orders, and the individual warlords, most of the time it's impossible to tell who has authority to do much of anything.
Part of the reason why Cyre could have lasted so long against attacks from all sides could have been that they had inherited the Imperial General Staff, which may have been a bastion of traditionalism and therefore whose members may have sided with Mishann in the struggle for the throne. If enough of the Galifaran officer corps went over to Cyre, it could have significantly drained Rekkenmark of experienced staff officers with which to teach the next generation. This, combined with what you described about Karrnath, could have ensured that Cyre really was the only nation with a General Staff and the means to train new members.
I always thought the plight of the imperial army deserved better shrift than it got in Forge of War, as what they or did not do could well have changed the course of Khorvaire's history. In the personal history I've rolled for my games -- the good bits of which I really do need to post here, someday -- the army is the cause of the war. Following the initial abortive clash of arms between Mishann's loyalists and her siblings, she began securing the strategic approaches to Cyre so as to guarantee her power: When it came time to secure Vathirond, the lord-mayor -- an appointee of Wroann -- balked and denied access to the city to Mishann's forces. The imperial loyalists immediately besieged the city: The city's garrison, manned by the imperial army, not only would not give access to the walls to Mishann's forces but actively contested the siege. This "mutiny" against their nominal commander-in-chief set the post-Battle of Scion's Sound narrative: The army itself did not recognize Mishann as the queen of Galifar, even though most of the military bureaucracy had relocated to Metrol to be with her. The revolt of the garrison of Vathirond succeeded in shattering a growing consensus amongst the ruling classes that Wroann, Kaius, and Thalin were in the wrong while, simultaneously, granting them a newfound swell of legitimacy. It also provided justification for the more ambitious middling officers to offer their allegiances to the governor-generals of the respective nations where they resided, which would account for much of the withering and dismemberment of the imperial army in the following months. And the rest, as they say, is history.
To change topics, I'd like to touch on the issue initially broached about army sizes. I flat-out hate Forge of War in this department, for reasons that've been tread over a thousand times. It's a piss-poor guide for trying to gauge these things, as the largest army to take the field in the book is a 100,000-man force raised by Thrane in the 970s, while the "large" army of Breland at Cairn Hill was only on the order of 40,000. Assuming that the population numbers in the ECS are junk and can be increaded by 20-25x to provide reaosnable population densities, and given the decent-sized industrial base with which to work with, one of the Five Nations should at the very least be able to put into field a force of the size deployed by a major power of the Napoleonic Wars: During the War of the Third Coalition, the Grande Armee topped out at approximately 200,000 men, while the Austrian imperial army was nominally capable of deploying 233,000. If we assume reasonably sophisticated reserve systems, there's no reason to think that total army sizes couldn't rival the mobilized armies of the North German Confederation or the Reichswehr of August 1914, at just over a million men.
Of course, at that size, you really can't deploy the army anymore and have to an army. My general rule remains three corps to an army, and three divisions to a corps, at ~10,000 men to a division. Cut and dry, I suppose, but it works well enough. (Then again, I run around with a game that features the fact four Cyran armies survived the Mourning and are the "guests" of the halflings of the Talenta Plains as a plot point, so what do I know?)
Re: the Imperial General Staff joining Mishann, I'd say that could be applied writ large to most of the military. Whatever one thinks about the circumstances of the succession following Jarot I, it's fairly clear that, at least initially, the military owed its fealty to Mishann. If we assume that the officer corps is professionalized to any meaningful degree, then, it would follow that their support would be passed to the time-honored successor of the late king.
I always thought the plight of the imperial army deserved better shrift than it got in Forge of War, as what they or did not do could well have changed the course of Khorvaire's history. In the personal history I've rolled for my games -- the good bits of which I really do need to post here, someday -- the army is the cause of the war. Following the initial abortive clash of arms between Mishann's loyalists and her siblings, she began securing the strategic approaches to Cyre so as to guarantee her power: When it came time to secure Vathirond, the lord-mayor -- an appointee of Wroann -- balked and denied access to the city to Mishann's forces. The imperial loyalists immediately besieged the city: The city's garrison, manned by the imperial army, not only would not give access to the walls to Mishann's forces but actively contested the siege. This "mutiny" against their nominal commander-in-chief set the post-Battle of Scion's Sound narrative: The army itself did not recognize Mishann as the queen of Galifar, even though most of the military bureaucracy had relocated to Metrol to be with her. The revolt of the garrison of Vathirond succeeded in shattering a growing consensus amongst the ruling classes that Wroann, Kaius, and Thalin were in the wrong while, simultaneously, granting them a newfound swell of legitimacy. It also provided justification for the more ambitious middling officers to offer their allegiances to the governor-generals of the respective nations where they resided, which would account for much of the withering and dismemberment of the imperial army in the following months. And the rest, as they say, is history.
I love this concept. That is all.
To change topics, I'd like to touch on the issue initially broached about army sizes. I flat-out hate Forge of War in this department, for reasons that've been tread over a thousand times. It's a piss-poor guide for trying to gauge these things, as the largest army to take the field in the book is a 100,000-man force raised by Thrane in the 970s, while the "large" army of Breland at Cairn Hill was only on the order of 40,000. Assuming that the population numbers in the ECS are junk and can be increaded by 20-25x to provide reaosnable population densities, and given the decent-sized industrial base with which to work with, one of the Five Nations should at the very least be able to put into field a force of the size deployed by a major power of the Napoleonic Wars: During the War of the Third Coalition, the Grande Armee topped out at approximately 200,000 men, while the Austrian imperial army was nominally capable of deploying 233,000. If we assume reasonably sophisticated reserve systems, there's no reason to think that total army sizes couldn't rival the mobilized armies of the North German Confederation or the Reichswehr of August 1914, at just over a million men.
Of course, at that size, you really can't deploy the army anymore and have to an army. My general rule remains three corps to an army, and three divisions to a corps, at ~10,000 men to a division. Cut and dry, I suppose, but it works well enough. (Then again, I run around with a game that features the fact four Cyran armies survived the Mourning and are the "guests" of the halflings of the Talenta Plains as a plot point, so what do I know?)
I've had this thought as well before, which would make warfare on Khorvaire look more like the way that wars were (reportedly) fought during the Spring and Autumn and Warring States Periods of ancient Chinese history. Massed crossbows, huge cavalry armies, and hundreds of thousands of infantrymen. I think one ancient source claimed that the standing army of the State of Q'in was over 1,000,000 strong.
And speaking of the Three Kingdoms era in China, I always thought that was a good model for the conduct of the Last War: Bouts of high-intensity warfare separated by markedly longer spells of low-intensity skirmishing or actual peace. Really, this is the only way I'd think you could get both the total war that is at times hinted at in the sourcebooks without everyone being materially and fiscally bankrupt in a decade. The interesting aspect of that is that most of the Last War was rather peacable in the grand scheme of things, with years or even decades going by on a passive front before it becomes active again. (A favorite example of this sort of thing that I've trotted out for my PCs before was that, in 948, Cyre attempted to amphibious assault on The Hilt: Given Sharn's removal from the major theaters of operation, the appearance of Cyran warships off the coast was a major psychological blow, which continues to haunt the city to the present, despite no further signs of Cyran aggression for the rest of the war.)
On another army size tangent, one of the things I thought never gets enough attention is the fact that army sizes, during the course of the Last War, probably ballooned. By Forge of War, army sizes at the close of the war are not much different than at the start. Which strikes me as incredibly silly: At the start of the war, Khorvaire's core human settlements have been at peace for the better part of a millennium, while at the end of the Last War they've been fighting each other for four generations. The military force required to accomplish a given task is bound to increase as the experience and quality of the two sides improves, as it is bound to do in such a long conflict: So it would stand to reason that the forces of the combatant powers would increase to provide it. To pay Forge of War a rare compliment, I think it gets the feel of the armies of the pre-900 or so Last War down fairly well, when the fighting was basically the War of Jarot's Succession and before both the kingdom had been shattered and the resources of nations broguht to bear on the conflict. Beyond that, though? It's birdcage lining.
I know I've seen claims that the ancient Chinese put a million men into the field. Such are probably worth taking with a grain of salt: After all, Herodotus made the same claim about the Persians at Thermopylae. But such is quibbling, as I agree with you that conventional warfare in Khorvaire is dominated by masses of infantry wielding repeating crossbows and fire team-deployed wandsmen.
I don't know about fire teams of wandsmen, necessarily, but only because the crafting of a magic wand by a man in a workshop wouldn't lend itself to those sorts of tactics very well; crafting a barely fit sword or a spearhead that only needs to survive a battle or two and some small skirmishes is very much easier. Also, I always avoid the repeating crossbows, because a real Chinese repeating crossbow couldn't hurt a fly without a poison tip. When I said masses of crossbows, I'm talking Hero style volleys.
And speaking of the Three Kingdoms era in China, I always thought that was a good model for the conduct of the Last War: Bouts of high-intensity warfare separated by markedly longer spells of low-intensity skirmishing or actual peace. Really, this is the only way I'd think you could get both the total war that is at times hinted at in the sourcebooks without everyone being materially and fiscally bankrupt in a decade.
I actually wasn't speaking of the Three Kingdoms period, I was talking about Warring States, as in pre-Imperial. Sun Tzu and Confucius, etc. The point is moot, though, since the style of warfare is similar to the Three Kingdoms (although the Warring States were all far more centralized and bureaucratic than the warlords of the Three Kingdoms period).
I don't know about fire teams of wandsmen, necessarily, but only because the crafting of a magic wand by a man in a workshop wouldn't lend itself to those sorts of tactics very well; crafting a barely fit sword or a spearhead that only needs to survive a battle or two and some small skirmishes is very much easier. Also, I always avoid the repeating crossbows, because a real Chinese repeating crossbow couldn't hurt a fly without a poison tip. When I said masses of crossbows, I'm talking Hero style volleys.
Re: repeating crossbows, I'm stuck in 3.x mechanics-speak, even though they had little bearing on real-life's Chinese repeating crossbows. I suspect I also have a bit different view on the tactical deployment of infantry masses: While I think massive crossbow volleys are an invaluable part of the general's toolkit, I always envisioned the armies of the Last War being drilled to prefer free-firing skirmish lines to minimize the risks posed by battlefield AoE effects. (Like volleys of arrows/bolts, for instance.)
Said AoE effects usually being provided by a fire team's wandsman, armed with an eternal wand of burning hands or color spray. By my original statement, I'd meant that a wandsman was incorporated into every fire team, not fire teams composed of wandsman. So a typical Cyran fire team of 993 A.K. might well consist of three crossbowmen and a wandsman, with two or three such fire teams to a squad. But that's because I always saw the Five Nations mass-producing folks with at least one level of magewright, expressly to provide a large enough pool of wand-users to allow such devolution.
I actually wasn't speaking of the Three Kingdoms period, I was talking about Warring States, as in pre-Imperial. Sun Tzu and Confucius, etc. The point is moot, though, since the style of warfare is similar to the Three Kingdoms (although the Warring States were all far more centralized and bureaucratic than the warlords of the Three Kingdoms period).
You'll have to pardon my horrible ignorance of Chinese history. What Chinese history I do know either comes from Koei's Rot3K games or from the past two centuries or so. I've always used the Napoleonic Wars as my reference point for describing the politics of the Last War, but there's relatively too much warfighting and not enough peace to make a good model.
That said, I think that you have changed my position on the existance of professionalization and the staff system in Eberron. The suggestion that Cyre inherited the Imperial General Staff is nothing short of brilliant, IMO. Furthermore, as the war wore on, the staff officers trained at Rekkenmark declined in number, and officers haphazardly trained by those staff officers replaced them.
As for the other nations creating staff systems as well, eh, I dunno about that. It just doesn't feel right to me.
I dont know enough about Chinese history to comment on the Warring States period. However, I wonder if, in Eberron, most of the activity was directed towards sieges. Kinda like in the Medieval period, or in the pre-Napoleonic period. The big goal was to take whatever fort/castle/city, and the armies only rarely met in open-field engagements. When a besieging army was threatened by another large army, the siege is broken off.
Of course, if you want that level of simmering combat, just have constant skirmishing. Armies are maneuvering to lay siege, but their recon/screening elements are constantly engaging similar enemy units, in order to a.) fight for information, and b.) deny information to the enemy.
edit: Oh, also: When did Aundair take control and lose control of Rekkenmark? I seem to remember reading somewhere that they had it for a long bloody time. If you figure that the bulk of the staff officers went to Cyre at the begining of the war, and any that didn't sided with Karrnath, it is quite possible for nobody to have been able to train staff officers for a big chunk of the Last War. Perhaps the whole staff concept is being rebuilt?
As for the other nations creating staff systems as well, eh, I dunno about that. It just doesn't feel right to me.
The Last War lasted for a century. It just seems impossible that such would not evolve in some form beyond Karrnath and Cyre, especially given that such a staff structure is part of the military tradition of Galifar. (If one opts to go with that bit of fanon, at any rate.) Whether such staffs would be any good is an entirely different question. Cyre and Karrnath were the only two nations whose staffs were competent and actually listened to, while I've always seen the Thrane general staff being a conflicted and ineffectual organization which suffers from permanent friction between its technocrats and crusaders; the Brelish general staff as being a thoroughly amateurish affair due to the institutional culture of the Brelish Army; and the Aundairian general staff as being perfectly competent but routinely having its sound reasoning ignored by the aristocratic generalship of that particular nation. Dysfunctional as they might be, I can't help but not imagine each combatant nation having built up something approximating one.
A better question, I think, might be whether the nations created by the Thronehold Accords have their own staffing arrangements. The most interesting to find out about, I think, would be Darguun. But that's because I've long been running an alternative Darguun, where Har'luuc plays the role of a Cyran-educated and -trained modernizer, a la Ito Hirobumi.
Of course, if you want that level of simmering combat, just have constant skirmishing. Armies are maneuvering to lay siege, but their recon/screening elements are constantly engaging similar enemy units, in order to a.) fight for information, and b.) deny information to the enemy.
I was thinking more on the grand strategic level than the operational one, though I agree that for good stretches of the Last War warfare probably resembled Eighteenth Century wars of maneuver. (To the point that I must resist the urge to write-up an episode featuring the Aundairian-Thrane equivalent of the Potato War.) To return to my previously citation of the Napoleonic Wars, Russia's experience really tracks with what I think the "standard" experience was of the Last War: It sat out most of the Wars of the French Revolution, only to briefly join the War of the Second Coalition in 1800, then back out of that on a whim because of the czar's madness, then intervene as a major combatant with varying degrees of success and bursts of peace following the Wars of the Third, Fourth, and Fifth Coalitions, before finally achieving victory as a combatant in the War of the Sixth Coalition. The only power that I envision as having basically had to fight every campaigning season for the duration of the Last War was Thrane, and that's because it was surrounded on all sides.
I was thinking more on the grand strategic level than the operational one, though I agree that for good stretches of the Last War warfare probably resembled Eighteenth Century wars of maneuver. (To the point that I must resist the urge to write-up an episode featuring the Aundairian-Thrane equivalent of the Potato War.) To return to my previously citation of the Napoleonic Wars, Russia's experience really tracks with what I think the "standard" experience was of the Last War: It sat out most of the Wars of the French Revolution, only to briefly join the War of the Second Coalition in 1800, then back out of that on a whim because of the czar's madness, then intervene as a major combatant with varying degrees of success and bursts of peace following the Wars of the Third, Fourth, and Fifth Coalitions, before finally achieving victory as a combatant in the War of the Sixth Coalition. The only power that I envision as having basically had to fight every campaigning season for the duration of the Last War was Thrane, and that's because it was surrounded on all sides.
Actually, I always took it that Cyre was the nation beset on all sides, but that's based mostly on the battles taking place right before the Mourning. I also assumed that, in a twist of historical fate, it would make sense for them to be the most under-pressure of the Five Nations (and surviving Cyrans might well attest this to the knowledge that the Cyran monarchy was the rightful heir to the throne of Galifar, and that the other nations continually attacked her out of jealousy).
From what I know of the Warring States period, the armies of that time greatly resembled the armies of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars moreso than the Kabinettskriege that occurred before, with massive armies of crossbowmen, supported by pikemen, screened by enormous numbers of chariotry and/or cavalry (the Chinese switched mostly to cavalry by the time Q'in started kicking ass, but chariots were never wholly abandoned; I could see Dwarves having a tradition of chariotry, honestly, because their stature must make it difficult to ride a horse). The conservative estimates of armies of the period still range into the hundreds of thousands, so the comparison with the armies of the combatant nations fighting Napoleon fits perfectly.
In fact, you can get a sense for the similarity of the military situation of the Warring States compared to the military situation of Napoleon's time by reading Sun Tzu and Clausewitz back-to-back.
Actually, I always took it that Cyre was the nation beset on all sides, but that's based mostly on the battles taking place right before the Mourning. I also assumed that, in a twist of historical fate, it would make sense for them to be the most under-pressure of the Five Nations (and surviving Cyrans might well attest this to the knowledge that the Cyran monarchy was the rightful heir to the throne of Galifar, and that the other nations continually attacked her out of jealousy).
Oh, you're quite right that Forge of War goes out of its way to belabor the point that Cyre was constantly besieged on all sides and was generally everyone's punching bag. The problem with that is Cyre's strategic geography calls bull crap on such, which either means that the authors of Forge of War are somewhat ignorant of military matters or that the Cyrans had the Idiot Ball welded into their hands. As Forge of War is rife with examples of the former, I'm inclined to believe this is another example thereof.
To make my point, let's check a map of Khorvaire. While it is true that Cyre is surrounded by hostiles -- at the start of the Last War, it was Karrnath, Breland, and Thrane versus Cyre and Aundair, with the first three sharing borders with Cyre. But Cyre's entire frontier with Thrane, and most of its frontier with Karrnath, is a water boundary: An arm of Scion's Sound in the west and the River Cyre in the east, which from both the 3.5e and 4e maps are generally wide obstacles that cannot be crossed without the undertaking of a major amphibious operation of the sort readily contestable by Cyran riverine forces. Pre-war Karrnath's border with pre-war Cyre, along what is nowadays the Talenta-Valenar frontier, does offer two viable invasion routes running above and below Lake Cyre. The route below Lake Cyre, aimed at Tronish, requires an army marching around the lake and across the northern tip of the Blade Desert, an unfavorable lengthening of your lines-of-supply and inhospitable terrain. The route above Lake Cyre is a straight-shot towards Metrol, which still requires fording the River Cyre while simultaneously attempting to invest one of the greatest cities in Khorvaire. The direct route is also so blatently obvious that employing it forfeits any hope of tactical, let alone operational or strategic, surprise. There is also the logistics issue that plagues marching below the lake, as your extended lines-of-supply and communication can be interdicted with relative ease by Cyran raiders.
Breland, though, has five avenues to invade Cyre from its pre-war borders: Above the River Brey, below the River Brey from the direction of Vathirond, through the great gap in the Seawall Mountains which Kennrun anchors, through the Marguul Pass, and across the River Korran from the direction of Korranburg. The last two routes are a tough road to hoe due to the poorly developed infrastructure that serve them and the amount of marching that must be done through lands filled with lots of (potentially) hostile goblinoids. Invading above the River Brey suffers from all the problems imposed by a river crossing, which makes it suboptimal. The Vathirond and Kennrun invasion routes are fairly open and the roads they march along lead right into the Cyran heartland: That said, they suffer from the problems associated with the invasion route above the River Cyre, in that they're obvious to the point that achieving any kind of surprise is nearly impossible.
...wow, that rant about Cyre's strategic geography kind of got out of hand, didn't it? It's because I've spent entirely too much time fulminating about it. Probably has a lot to do with the fact that, in Forge of War, it seems like Cyre's being invaded every other week. I'd also like to note that that particular book has it inverted as to when Cyre's at its most vulnerable: Cyre, at the beginning of the Last War, truly was surrounded by enemies on all sides and threatened with being snuffed out, with Thrane, Breland, and Karrnath in active collusion to conquer and subdue it. Once that initial coalition was sundered by the vagaries of royal politics, the direct threat of being overrun diminished. Sure, the nation would invariably be threatened by some combination of Thrane, Breland, and Karrnath, as well as eventually Darguun and Valenar for that matter, but it would never rival the raw forces at the disposal of the former three as they were actively making common cause at the start of the war. Cyre's problem during the bulk of the Last War was not so much one of national survival as much as that of strategic mismatch, with its available resources never meshing well with its war-time objectives.
Back onto the topic of the sizes of the armies of the Five Nations, the last I checked even in 4th Edition the size of Khorvaire was approximately equivalent to Russia (even kind of looks like it, now that I think about it...). Going by your estimate of 20x-25x the numbers usually given for population to achieve the correct densities, I estimated that the population of the Five Nations would be somewhere in the range of 230-280 million; still a pretty low density, but certainly more realistic when considering that Galifar was supposed to be something approximating a federal state.
This would place the upper estimate for a nation like Breland (with the largest population) at around 75 million, and the lower estimate for a nation like Cyre (with the smallest population) at around 30 million. This would actually place their theoretical manpower capacity in the range of the combatant nations of WWI, although I would allow for the idea that at the beginning of the war reserve systems weren't in place since Galifar had no real strategic threats to warrant mobilization plans for millions of men.
Just an interesting thought; at the height of the Last War, the fighting may have been on a scale not generally suggested in most fantasy worlds. Even bigger than Warring States China, in fact.
Just an interesting thought; at the height of the Last War, the fighting may have been on a scale not generally suggested in most fantasy worlds. Even bigger than Warring States China, in fact.
Wait, Eberron-as-is or Eberron-as-us?
Just an interesting thought; at the height of the Last War, the fighting may have been on a scale not generally suggested in most fantasy worlds. Even bigger than Warring States China, in fact.
Wait, Eberron-as-is or Eberron-as-us?
Eberron-as-us. Clearly it wasn't intended for anyone to extrapolate that the Five Nations could field million man armies. I think it's refreshing, though. Kind of reminds me of the Silmarillion, when he writes about the War of Wrath and how Morgoth's hosts "filled the whole of the North". I always envisioned that this meant millions of orcs swarming around in vast armies. It makes the battles more akin to WWI or WWII offensives (especially WWII on the Eastern Front), where even though they are fighting in close order with melee and short-ranged missile weapons, there are simply so many men involved that "battles" last for days or weeks instead of hours.
It also makes the effect that the Last War would have on the psyches of the inhabitants of Khorvaire all the more traumatic, since this went on for 100 years. Now, instead of thinking of the Last War as the sort of chevauchee raiding of the Hundred Year's War, I will be thinking of it in terms of vast offensives fought across huge swathes of territory. The casualties would be so high and the fighting so brutal that the fighting would be punctuated by long periods of inactivity.
Hmm. Now, do we need to differentiate between 3.5 Eberron and 4e Eberron? I don't really think we do, but 4e Eberron is smaller.....
Anyways. The thing is those "long periods of inactivity" would certainly help amortize Warforged units.
Right. I was a little confused, 'cause I couldn't see how Eberron-as-is could support million-man armies.
Hmm. Now, do we need to differentiate between 3.5 Eberron and 4e Eberron? I don't really think we do, but 4e Eberron is smaller.....
Anyways. The thing is those "long periods of inactivity" would certainly help amortize Warforged units.
From looking at the 4e Eberron map, Khorvaire is still approximately the size of Russia. I got into Eberron with the 4th Edition, so I don't know how large Khorvaire was supposed to be in 3.5e (I have 3.5e books, but I never really studied the map). Was it supposed to be much larger? Or was Eberron as a whole supposed to be larger? Perhaps they just reduced the amount of ocean on the planet and the continents are all the same size. In any case, from the scale evident on the 4e map, it's still enormous and would still require some ~280 million people to even have a rural population density.
I think Forge of War would still be a good reference for figuring out the pattern of offensive periods during the Last War. Obviously, just before the Mourning was the last.
Side note: Breland's plus points are its size, population and large productivity both for food and other products. Its climate is also much more favorable than other regions. It might not have the organization of Karnnath, but I can easily see any country invading it, facing the same issues Japan faced in China or German in USSR. At some point share numerical advantage is going to pose an problem. Not that this is automatically going to happen, but it is a possibility, especially if you have PCs fighting on Breland's side whose tactics seriously delay any opposing army.
Considering the size of Cyre, and the fact that large part of it was wilderness under threat by goblins and worse things, its geography might very well be the reason it survived till the end. Furthermore, in a land rife with magic and flying mounts, water in itself posses less of a hindrance than it did in pre-airplane RL warfare.
Water remains a major obstacle to the movement of armies, to this very day, though modern combat engineering and amphibious assault capabilities are more than up to the task. I will agree that water poses no real barrier to moving small numbers of men, such as an adventuring party: But in the real world, the same holds true for determined bands of determined infiltrators. Once you get onto the scale of moving thousands of men, and the baggage train required to support them on the opposite bank, it becomes exponentially more difficult. Not to say that it is, or should be, impossible. Just that assaults across major water obstacles such as the Rivers Cyre and Brey are likely to be shied away from whenever possible due to the difficulties entailed in breaching them.
Another thing is that Cyre seems to lack mineral resources. Its mountains were goblin invested, and they also lost them later in the war. They might very well lack easy access to wood and metals.
We really don't have a good enough picture of non-Mournland Cyre's economic or mineral geography to make such a statement. The extent of what we know is really confined to a couple of throwaway lines and here there, such as Eston boasting adamantine mines which collapsed during the Day of Mourning. The said, I think the "mountains = minerals" logic is a wee-bit flawed, to the extent that Eberron has sufficient earth-moving at its disposal to make pit mining viable and thus opening up areas not traditionally considered ripe for exploitation. I actually always saw pit mining as being the preferred way to harvest dragonshards: As Eberron dragonshards are always relatively close to the surface, digging exceptionally large holes in search of them always made intrinsic sense.
Side note: Breland's plus points are its size, population and large productivity both for food and other products. Its climate is also much more favorable than other regions. It might not have the organization of Karnnath, but I can easily see any country invading it, facing the same issues Japan faced in China or German in USSR.
Might I quibble with your history a little? I think I get where you're going, the troubles faced by the Japanese in the Second Sino-Japanese War and by the Germans post-Barbarossa are really well-translated to the Last War. As the problem for both the Germans and the Japanese was an inability to bring sufficient force to bear at the decisive point: This was a function of their undertaking of multi-front warmaking and having their industrial base inexorably wittled away by Allied strategic airpower and naval control. (All right, that's a horrid simplification of the Second Sino-Japanese War, but that's because fleshing out all the nuances of that conflict relative to this would take days.)
At any rate, what I think you're trying to get at is conceiving of space as a medium of force. Twaddly as that sounds, it means using one's own immense interior reaches as a force multiplier: This kind of thinking was most prominently advertised by the pre-February Revolution STAVKA, whose default reactions after disasters like Gorlice-Tarnow was to indiffidently shrug and withdraw 150 miles deeper into Poland and then White Russia, content in the fact that every mile withdrawal was one mile closer to your supply bases, while the opposite was true of your enemy. The idea of sacrificing national territory so as to tire-out the enemy and guarantee your eventual recapture of it seems a profoundly Russian idea, come to think of it.
At any rate, given Brelish power is concentrated in the Wroat-Sharn corridor and is far removed from the frontiers where armies would be marching, I could very much see the Brelish crown engaging in such practices. It also further provides a reason for the falling out between Breland and Zilargo, giving the latter a reason to resent the rule of the former and to actively pursue independence. Whereas the kings of Breland have the vast prarie buffer north and east of Wroat with which to work with, substantive amounts of Zilargo's settlements lay between a rough line running from the Howling Peaks and Thurim Bay in the west and the Seawall Mountains in the east, with several major cities on the western slopes of the latter. Given that the Seawall Mountains delineated the border of a major enemy combatant, defense of Zilargo required vigorous and aggressive action at the point of incursion, something that would have clashed horribly with a strategic culture that used space as a medium of force. (Seeking independence due to the perception that Breland was dilly-dallying and dragging its feet in its defense of the Zil frontier makes for a better rationale such actions than what's presented in Forge of War, methinks, which constitued the Trust subtlety changing the name of who it paid fealty to and sage-nodding.)
At some point share numerical advantage is going to pose an problem. Not that this is automatically going to happen, but it is a possibility, especially if you have PCs fighting on Breland's side whose tactics seriously delay any opposing army.
I think this raises a good point: For all the talk we do about the size of armies, it really depends upon what you want your PCs doing. If you want the PCs to be able to decide battles and alter the course of the war, then small armies of the sort described in Forge of War seeking each other out and engaging in an hours-long pitched medieval battle work perfectly. In that kind of environment, the combat is simple enough and the numbers small enough that a small, intrepid band of special operators can engage in derring-do and win the day for their side by infiltrating the enemy's camp and setting fire to his baggage train, for instance.
But when you start getting into the size that has been talked about in this thread, with attacking armies numbering in the hundreds of thousands, things change. What can a party hope to do to directly alter the course of an offensive that's got hundreds of thousands of men moving forward across a front that's hundreds of miles wide? Sure, they can blow bridges, engage in guerilla warfare, or maybe even try a decapitation strike: The former two will, at best, merely slow down the unrolling of the offensive by a few hours or days at best, while the latter will not be capable of producing the desired results, because any organization capable of planning and unrolling such an operation has the organizational depth to replace whoever the PCs killed. At that point, the war becomes a backdrop or part of the scenery, rather than an event which the PCs can shape through their actions.
Personally, I'm a fan of the latter, because I like the adventurers-as-special-operators motif, in that they help win wars by doing things that the rank-and-file cannot, but at the same time they cannot win wars through their actions alone. And I like having the big, expansive, high-intensity war of the sort modern players can associate with as a backdrop for the markedly smaller things which are happening militarily in the post-Thronehold world.
Also, I like giving the players the impression that the ignition of the Next War is something they should want to avoid at all costs, because once it begins their role in the greater events of the war would be marginal, at best. So the events leading up to war become all the more dramatic as the players try desperately to prevent it from actually happening.
Looking at the 4e map, we see Morningcrest connected to the rest of eastern Thrane by a network of secondary roads, as is Fort Light. Nevertheless, Aundair seems really built for north-south travel, and the only east-west travel is to the Eldeen Reaches. Thrane seems to be better set up for east-west travel, but I guess that logistical strength may be negated by the stated speed and strategic mobility of Aundairan troops.
Still, though, I can easily see the Thrane-Aundair front being the most heavily contested, which is why His Infernal Bovinity wrote a lot of tension and hatred between them.
One of the things I love about looking at the maps is trying to divine what operational plans were deployed during the Last War. Thrane offers one of the more useful cases for this, as its goals after 914 consist of reclaiming everything south of the Fairhaven-Passage lightning rail line which was occupied by Aundair and to, more generally, crusade in the name of the Silver Flame. I suspect that, as they never did recapture what they sought to, that crusading afar against the Brelish, Karrns, and Cyrans was opted for due to lack of success against the Aundairians.
We can visualize the Thrane-Aundairian front as being divided into four sector: A southwestern sector, a crescent-shaped engagement zone running between Vanguard Keep and Tower Vigilant; a western sector running from Tower Vigilant to Tower Valiant; a northwestern sector running from Tower Valiant to Wrogar Keep; and a northern sector running from Wrogar Keep to the River Aundair and beyond. The northwestern front was probably the most active sector on the Thrane-Aundairian front, because its well-developed road network best supports large maneuvering masses, as well as offering a strategic objective worthy of the expenditure of large amounts of effort in Lathleer, whose capture would have cut Aundair in half. As such would be patently evident to commanders on both sides, however, it would put Thranes into the position of the attacking Allies in 1915 and 1916: Attacking positions which the enemy had deliberately chosen to make his stand upon and which had been heavily prepared for such.
Such a strategic situation would most likely breed an impetus to conduct diversionary operations on other fronts to sop up scarce resources and more generally threaten Aundair's strategic position if left unchecked: Three such options readily lend themselves to such a campaign. The first would be a subsidiary attack in the western sector, aimed at besieging and enveloping Tower Valiant; the second would be to launch a thrust towards Ghalt from Fort Light, threatening to roll up the end western and northwestern sectors; and the third would be to march across the River Aundair towards Askelios, with the aim of cutting off Thaliost and the rest of the eastern and northeastern quarters of Aundair from Fairhaven. The profitability of such ventures really depends upon the DM, though I personally envisioned the Thranes as bereft of operational creativity, so most the effort exerted would be exerted in the northwestern sector with a sole subsidiary operation originating in the western sector. (I always rolled the 970s the the great of Thrane operational innovation, with them marking a shift in the center of Thrane operations against Aundair to the southwestern front, where the goal was to march a two-pronged offensive towards Ghalt and Arcanix simultaneously, using the Eldritch Grove as a wedge to keep the Aundairian defenders divided. It ultimately failed, due to the relevant commanders prioritizing the march on Ghalt over that on Arcanix, and with Arcanix prong downgraded to subsidiarity it ultimately bogged down in front of Larunor, where it became Thrane's Gallipoli.)
As has been implict throughout, most of this assumes that it would Thrane on the offensive. It's just hard to imagine Aundair, with its demography and preference for the magical, mustering sufficient force to go blasting about in a general offensive. Limited offensives and counterattacks are surely within their grasp and would have been part of the ebb-and-flow of the campaign. I just can't see them going on the strategic offensive against Thrane without the help of Karrnath or Breland.
However, what I was referring to by "largest" front was not geographical extent but numbers of personnel and equipment. I suppose saying it was the most contested probably covers this, but I just wanted to clarify.
In terms of equipment and heavy arms usage...that'd probably got to Cyran-Karrnathi front. But that's because I've always rolled that as being the home of all the logical conclusions of magical warfare: Gunships, advanced undead, chemical warfare, and the whole nine-yards. One of my favorite NPCs that my PCs got to meet once was a Cyran veteran of that frontier, describing the abject horror of seeing a wall of cloudkill descending and followed by a boneyard and waves of undead assault troops charging through it.
Anyways. The odd thing is that Forge of War has a strong Aundairan offensive into, and even occupation of parts of, Karrnath for a good chunk of the war. White Arch Bridge was destroyed in 928, but somehow, Aundairan forces managed to operate east of Rekkenmark for a while. Can't find out when. Hmm. Some sort of Portal ritual, perhaps?
Gotta go. Dinner.
Anyways. The odd thing is that Forge of War has a strong Aundairan offensive into, and even occupation of parts of, Karrnath for a good chunk of the war. White Arch Bridge was destroyed in 928, but somehow, Aundairan forces managed to operate east of Rekkenmark for a while. Can't find out when. Hmm. Some sort of Portal ritual, perhaps?
If they were able to secure a bridgehead, I don't see why they wouldn't be able to continue operating across the river. I always thought the scale of the waterways on the published maps were oversized anyway, for clarity. I assumed they were normal-sized rivers.
If they controlled coastline, also, they could have resupplied by sea. I don't think we really have enough information about the structure of the militaries of the Five Nations to discount a strong Aundairian fleet. Especially if they occupied large portions of Karrnath, they might be able to utilize resources in situ. There are any number of possible options. Rivers are barriers, but not absolute ones.
From an in-universe perspective, it could very well be that such an offensive and occupation was mentioned in the text precisely because it was a remarkable feat.
Also, I think that the waterway that divides Aundair and Karrnath is pretty big, hence why the White Arch Bridge was all big and important, and a big deal when it got blown up.
Forge of War does have quite a few mentions of naval clashes up and down.....what is it that White Arch Bridge used to cross? Scion's Sound? Or is that somewhere else?
Also, I think that the waterway that divides Aundair and Karrnath is pretty big, hence why the White Arch Bridge was all big and important, and a big deal when it got blown up.
Yes, Scion's Sound. I never really liked the size implied by the official maps, though; it's outrageously large.
In the world I run, construction of the White Arch Bridge began in the 470s with the goal of completion in time to commemorate the 500th anniversary of Galifar's founding. As this predates the invention of the lightning rail by several centuries, for big chunks of the bridge's history is was used primarily by foot traffic. At fifteen miles, it is rather hard to cross the bridge in a single day, and very nearly impossible for a caravan of the sort that was intended to be the main user of the bridge. So there'd need to be some manner of rest-stop along the bridge: I always envisioned such a settlement arising at the midpoint of the bridge and growing into a modestly sized settlement. (And, in the age of the lightning rail, a veritable tourist trap.) The idea of armies marching across the White Arch Bridge having to fight house-to-house to capture Midpoint, or whatever the settlement would be called, always struck me as an amusing twist in the saga of the structure.
I must admit, I'm partial to the idea of the White Arc Bridge being the fifteen mile-long structure required to match the scale of the maps: It's the type of magical megastructure that adds some wonderment to the world and demonstrates the artifice that the Five Nations can undertake when they choose to do so. It also, as Ogiwan notes, provides a good reason why House Orien cannot rebuild it: Were it the piddly quarter-mile-long structure depicted in the art of the sourcebooks, House Orien could easly have built a woodem truss bridge of some variety to replace it by now. (Well, assuming the Karrns and whoever was owning the Thaliost peninsula at the time allowed it, but you get the point: The issue would be a political pissing match between House Orien and the states on the opposing shores of Scion's Sound, rather than an inability to rebuild it due to lack of capital.)
In the world I run, construction of the White Arch Bridge began in the 470s with the goal of completion in time to commemorate the 500th anniversary of Galifar's founding. As this predates the invention of the lightning rail by several centuries, for big chunks of the bridge's history is was used primarily by foot traffic. At fifteen miles, it is rather hard to cross the bridge in a single day, and very nearly impossible for a caravan of the sort that was intended to be the main user of the bridge. So there'd need to be some manner of rest-stop along the bridge: I always envisioned such a settlement arising at the midpoint of the bridge and growing into a modestly sized settlement. (And, in the age of the lightning rail, a veritable tourist trap.) The idea of armies marching across the White Arch Bridge having to fight house-to-house to capture Midpoint, or whatever the settlement would be called, always struck me as an amusing twist in the saga of the structure.
Juums, your ability to convert me to your vision of the Last War continues to amaze. That does, indeed, sound really cool. Now I'm thinking of the Chesapeake Bay Bridge and the rest stop in the center. Of course, the White Arch Bridge (being magical) wouldn't need to have tunnels, since it's probably high enough to allow even the largest-mast ships to pass beneath it.
Oh! If it was a big arch (I'm assuming it is), then there could be a House Ghallandra Golden Dragon at the midpoint/highest point!
Do we know exactly how the bridge was destroyed, btw?
Juums, your ability to convert me to your vision of the Last War continues to amaze. That does, indeed, sound really cool. Now I'm thinking of the Chesapeake Bay Bridge and the rest stop in the center. Of course, the White Arch Bridge (being magical) wouldn't need to have tunnels, since it's probably high enough to allow even the largest-mast ships to pass beneath it.
I admit, what planted the idea in my head was the memory of visiting that kitschy gift shop located midway across the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel. It just seemed such a perfect fit not to use it as the basis for something.
Do we know exactly how the bridge was destroyed, btw?
I don't have Forge of War in front of me, but I dimly recall that the bridge was destroyed at Kaius's behest through means not exposited on. It's probably best such means were never exposited upon, given that since we're imagining the bridge as being as long as some of the longest RL span, the magic required to blow it would have unfortunate side effects for setting continuty. (I.E. if you've got magic big enough to blow out a big portion of a fifteen mile-long stone bridge, why aren't you using it as the mother of all heavy siege weapons?)
I've always rolled the Forge of War explanation as being spin that's been accepted as historical fact by the narrator of the history section, as the little asides that litter it imply that we're reading a historian's take on events, rather than a Word of God declaration by the setting designers. To borrow another bit that's too perfct of a fit not to us from another thread, I've run with the bridge having been built in a manifest zone of Daanvi, with the elemental order seeping in from the manifest zone providing a key part of the structural integrity of the bridge. Given the inherent chaos that battle produces, that house-to-house fighting in Midpoint between Aundairians and Karrns eventually proved too abhorrent for the manifest zone, which diminished in strength significantly. Its manifest zone buttress compromised, physics in due time reassrted themselves and Midpoint collapsed into the sea, taking as much of the bridge with it as you feel required. (I've always thought it was the mid-third or so that was actually destroyed, with rest of the structure surviving to this day.) Kaius tried to spin the collapse as a matter of national security in order to appease his own nobility, as he was on the hook for reparations to House Orien for his nation's role in blowing up one of the house's major commerce arteries and it would be the nobility who would have to cough up the requisite gold.
I always imagined Eberron bigger than what's in 3.5 with Khorvaire being the size of say Asia and a population about 15 times bigger. Just wonder if the 3.5 number is still "official" since this would obviously change the way I imagine the war.
Just wonder since 4e Eberron doesn't mention population or size.
I always imagined Eberron bigger than what's in 3.5 with Khorvaire being the size of say Asia and a population about 15 times bigger. Just wonder if the 3.5 number is still "official" since this would obviously change the way I imagine the war.
I hope I'm not stepping a little too far by saying this, but I believe that Mr. Baker himself would say that everyone has their own Eberron (i.e. it can be whatever you like).
I usually run it so that Khorvaire is about the size of the Russian Empire (or Galifar was), and that the population circa 996 YK is ~200,000,000 (humanoids). The Five Nations must have at least this sort of population if they are to achieve even a rural population density, and I think that the social and economic sophistication of the Five Nations would tend to produce populous societies. Anyone else could play it any way they want, though (I think I even read Mr. Baker saying that he plays a much smaller Khorvaire, and that the maps that were published were much larger than he had originally intended).
Nations and Peoples of Khorvaire:
--Aundair: 36,000,000
--Breland: 105,000,000
--Cyran Diaspora: 14,000,000(of a pre-Mourning population of 41,000,000)
--Darguun: 29,000,000
--Droaam: 12,000,000
--Eldeen Reaches: 22,000,000
--Karrnath: 45,000,000
--Mror Holds: 15,000,000
--Q'Barra: 1,000,000
--Shadow Marches: 3,000,000
--Talenta Plains: 10,000,000
--Thrane: 94,000,000
--Valenar: 8,000,000
--Zilargo: 13,000,000
Total Population: 378,000,000 as of 998 A.K.; 405,000,000 on the Day of Mourning
Population of the Five Nations: 294,000,000 as of 998 A.K.; 321,000,000 on the Day of Mourning.
As an aside, working on this scale gives the Day of Mourning a properly fearsome scale: It means twenty-seven million souls lost in a matter of hours, ranking it on the scale of a regional nuclear war in terms of devastation of human(oid) life. Not that the old number from Five Nations of a million dead is necessarily small beer, but to the modern mind the larger provides a better point-of-reference for the truly harrowing nature of the event.
To borrow from the numbers I more or less use in my current game, to give a sense of proportion: I assume a Russia-ish-sized Khorvaire too, if not slightly larger.
Nations and Peoples of Khorvaire:
--Aundair: 36,000,000
--Breland: 105,000,000
--Cyran Diaspora: 14,000,000(of a pre-Mourning population of 41,000,000)
--Darguun: 29,000,000
--Droaam: 12,000,000
--Eldeen Reaches: 22,000,000
--Karrnath: 45,000,000
--Mror Holds: 15,000,000
--Q'Barra: 1,000,000
--Shadow Marches: 3,000,000
--Talenta Plains: 10,000,000
--Thrane: 94,000,000
--Valenar: 8,000,000
--Zilargo: 13,000,000
Total Population: 378,000,000 as of 998 A.K.; 405,000,000 on the Day of Mourning
Population of the Five Nations: 294,000,000 as of 998 A.K.; 321,000,000 on the Day of Mourning.
As an aside, working on this scale gives the Day of Mourning a properly fearsome scale: It means twenty-seven million souls lost in a matter of hours, ranking it on the scale of a regional nuclear war in terms of devastation of human(oid) life. Not that the old number from Five Nations of a million dead is necessarily small beer, but to the modern mind the larger provides a better point-of-reference for the truly harrowing nature of the event.
See, I placed each of the Five Nations on a relatively equal footing, population-wise, with Breland being the largest at 64,000,000 or so, with a lower population for the whole of Khorvaire. Of course, I was only considering humanoids since I figure a proper census of the monstrous population would never have been taken. I kind of like your numbers a lot more, though.
By my reckoning, Cyre's population on the Day of Mourning was closer to 34 million. But yes, I definitely appreciate the "fearsome scale" of the destruction. I also think that a figure running past WWI and up to WWII as far as deaths (all told, so that includes the Mourning figure for Cyre) definitely fits better into the supposed psychological impact of the Last War on the peoples of Khorvaire.
At a Medieval level of destruction, it would (arguably) not have as much of an impact.
It also allows for much more mind-blowing military clashes. I call Karrnath's undead soldiers the "Dread Legions of Karrnath", and they are contained in vaults beneath the surface all over the country. In my Eberron, they number somewhere around 2,000,000 strong. Mobilization of the Dread Legions would be a terrifying spectacle for all who witnessed it, with undead pouring out of these vaults for weeks marching toward their assembly areas.
Anyways. Forge of War page 21 states that saboteurs used, "magical fire" to destroy the bridge, and that nobody is sure who (or why) it was destroyed. Suspects include Thrane, Aundair, and Karrnath.
edit: Also, the numbers for Aundair and the Eldeen Reaches seem too close together. Though, I forget what the stated percentage of land and pop Aundair lost when the Reaches seceeded.
"Dread Legions of Karrnath"? Please. I am far more a fan of calling them, "Risen Patriots."
Anyways. Forge of War page 21 states that saboteurs used, "magical fire" to destroy the bridge, and that nobody is sure who (or why) it was destroyed. Suspects include Thrane, Aundair, and Karrnath.
I suppose if you think of Karrnath as being akin to a certain Eastern European state (coughrussiacough), then "Risen Patriots" has just the right kind of sardonic twang to it, the sort that probably makes foreigners cringe.
Actually, my players loved it. I threw a bunch of Rotwings at them dropping alchemical bombs on them, and they asked me if they were from the Karrnathi Risen Grenadiers.
I meant foreigners in-game.
That does sound pretty cool, though. Maybe I'll call them the "Risen Legions".
See, I placed each of the Five Nations on a relatively equal footing, population-wise, with Breland being the largest at 64,000,000 or so, with a lower population for the whole of Khorvaire. Of course, I was only considering humanoids since I figure a proper census of the monstrous population would never have been taken. I kind of like your numbers a lot more, though.
There are two problems with modern demographic parity in the Five Nations. The first is that, for most of the Last War, most of the combatants were not at their current size and demography. Using the map given by Forge of War for the Five Nations in 894 A.K. and assuming that populations are relatively stable, increasing by 15% over the past century, and that what gains are had are spread around relatively evenly, you get the following numbers: Aundair 49,300,000; Breland 113,000,000; Cyre 74,200,000; Karrnath 51,000,000; Thrane 79,900,000. Though I would argue that populations haven't been stable throughout the Last War, with the territory of modern Darguun having on the order of five million in its Cyran-documented census and subsequently experiencing a population explosion as the goblinoids came out of the mountains in droves, accelerating even moreso after the independence of Darguun was secured.
...what was my point to be with this? Oh yes. The harder one leans on modern demographic parity, the more things get screwy for the Last War. This is because we have canonically established things like Aundair's leveraging of its arcane sophistication as a force multiplier: If Aundair has more bodies slushing about, its magical mastery needs to be reduced to account for such or it's forced to choke on the Idiot Ball for the duration of the Last War. Given that I want Aundair's preferred manner of warmaking to be very artillery-centric, the former is intolerable and it has to have a relatively small population compared to its archnemesis Thrane. On the flip-side, Thrane's canonical hat is its levee en masse of peasants, necessitating an out-sized population for its relatively compact national territory is required. (As it is for needing to repeatedly conduct frontal assault against positions guarded by fireball-throwing arcanists.)
But demography is ultimately what you make of it: My numbers have got a lot of baked-in assumptions, so they're very much my own.
Also, the numbers for Aundair and the Eldeen Reaches seem too close together. Though, I forget what the stated percentage of land and pop Aundair lost when the Reaches seceeded.
I believe the stated figures were two-thirds of pre-war Aundair's territory and a third of its population were lost when the Reaches broke off from Aundair.
Speaking of baked-in assumptions, this is a rather prominent example of one. I roll the Reaches as being a profoundly divided place, due primarily to cultural reasons: Galifarn Aundair's population belt was mainly centered along the arc of roads running from Thaliost in the east to Delathorn in the west and around Lake Galifar to Erlaskar and Sylbaran in the south. The lakefolk who reside on the great trade roads account for two-thirds of the souls in the Reaches, as well as an even bigger chunk of its economic activities, remain culturally Aundairian to this day. They joined the revolt against Fairhaven principally out of localism: They felt they were being asked to go die protecting the soil and interests of Thranes, as all the land Aundair acquired south of the River Aundair was considered to be, while problems of raiders and enemy infiltration continued unabated in the Reaches. Following independence, the lakefolk have uneasily coexisted with the "druidic" elements of the revolt, held together principally by the necessity of maintaining roder in a nation surrounded by chaos. With the subsiding of the Last War, the cultural differences are coming to the fore, due in no small part to a perceived hostility to commerce and industry on the part of the druids who rule the Reaches.
So, in short, the traditional elements one expects from the Reaches -- druids of various races and species, centaurs, other humanoids willing to submit to being counted -- is about seven million, which is about where it should be. The difference is made up by the idea of the lakefolk, who have a demography more in-line with the agrarian and more densely populated Five Nations.
I believe the stated figures were two-thirds of pre-war Aundair's territory and a third of its population were lost when the Reaches broke off from Aundair.
I believe it was two-thirds of Aundair's pre-war territory and one-fifth of it's pre-war population. I believe that was in the ECG. I could be mistaken.
This leads me to wonder what warfare between millions of combatants using (primarily, but not exclusively) swords, bows, and other traditional weaponry would look like. I think I calculated once that if you have a single army in numbers large enough so that 50,000 men occupied the front rank, and allotting about a yard of space for each man in the line (based on the Roman Army's stipulations), that it comes out to a little over 26 miles of battlespace. If I remember correctly, that's beyond the horizon even at sea, isn't it?
This leads me to wonder what warfare between millions of combatants using (primarily, but not exclusively) swords, bows, and other traditional weaponry would look like. I think I calculated once that if you have a single army in numbers large enough so that 50,000 men occupied the front rank, and allotting about a yard of space for each man in the line (based on the Roman Army's stipulations), that it comes out to a little over 26 miles of battlespace. If I remember correctly, that's beyond the horizon even at sea, isn't it?
I think what you're doing is conflating total army size with field army size. The nations of Khorvaire could easily support a total of a million men or more under arms; whether they could put an army into the field of that size is a rather different question. I sincerely doubt that there were any that large, due to the logistical hurdles required to simply feed it, let alone employ it operationally. (And any commander with a front-rank of 50,000 men in phalanx is doing something horribly wrong, given the risks posed by AoE stuff in Eberron and that he could do much more with many smaller units than one titanic one.)
Nevertheless, tactics and operational thinking would clearly evolve beyond standard linear tactics rather quickly, if they had not already done so prior to the start of the Last War. The best way to describe what I always envisioned as the "classical" mode of close-order operations for the Last War was Napoleonic warfare with a modern C3 infrastructure: You still get masses of men volley-firing and bayonet-charging to the beat of linear tactics, with hand-waved crossbows instead of muskets, in WW1-scale formations because of the glories of rapid magical communication. As the war wore on, I tend to envision Aundair and Cyre as having evolved beyond the classical model towards a pure enfilade/defilade approach, due to ever-increasing devolution of wands and other arcane heavy arms. While Breland and Karrnath adhere to their own permutations of the classical model and Thrane remaining downright retrograde into the post-war era, continuing to rely disproportionately on pure pike squares and the value of the charge.
This leads me to wonder what warfare between millions of combatants using (primarily, but not exclusively) swords, bows, and other traditional weaponry would look like. I think I calculated once that if you have a single army in numbers large enough so that 50,000 men occupied the front rank, and allotting about a yard of space for each man in the line (based on the Roman Army's stipulations), that it comes out to a little over 26 miles of battlespace. If I remember correctly, that's beyond the horizon even at sea, isn't it?
I think what you're doing is conflating total army size with field army size. The nations of Khorvaire could easily support a total of a million men or more under arms; whether they could put an army into the field of that size is a rather different question. I sincerely doubt that there were any that large, due to the logistical hurdles required to simply feed it, let alone employ it operationally. (And any commander with a front-rank of 50,000 men in phalanx is doing something horribly wrong, given the risks posed by AoE stuff in Eberron and that he could do much more with many smaller units than one titanic one.)
Nevertheless, tactics and operational thinking would clearly evolve beyond standard linear tactics rather quickly, if they had not already done so prior to the start of the Last War. The best way to describe what I always envisioned as the "classical" mode of close-order operations for the Last War was Napoleonic warfare with a modern C3 infrastructure: You still get masses of men volley-firing and bayonet-charging to the beat of linear tactics, with hand-waved crossbows instead of muskets, in WW1-scale formations because of the glories of rapid magical communication. As the war wore on, I tend to envision Aundair and Cyre as having evolved beyond the classical model towards a pure enfilade/defilade approach, due to ever-increasing devolution of wands and other arcane heavy arms. While Breland and Karrnath adhere to their own permutations of the classical model and Thrane remaining downright retrograde into the post-war era, continuing to rely disproportionately on pure pike squares and the value of the charge.
As I put it in another thread, I don't prefer using arcane weaponry as substitutes for modern arms. I always envision military magic taking on a more "original solutions to military problems" tone, with only the rare occurrence of heavy armament and area of effect attacks. So, the way I run it, it's still largely ancient and medieval in terms of battlefield tactics, but late 19th century in terms of operations and grand strategy (if the Five Nations have equivalent organizations to General Staffs).
Also, crossbows kind of stink as substitutes for muskets; I actually imagine crossbow volleys as more akin to a light artillery barrage, rather than a musket volley, since while the range on a crossbow is great, it only achieves that range by indirect fire (after all, crossbows can fire over walls!). Although I doubt that individual field armies would ever grow into the millions (why would you do that anyway, when a few hundred thousand is very large and much easier to maneuver), the formations could still be quite large, much larger than Roman or Medieval armies (probably close to Napoleon, it's true).
As I put it in another thread, I don't prefer using arcane weaponry as substitutes for modern arms. I always envision military magic taking on a more "original solutions to military problems" tone, with only the rare occurrence of heavy armament and area of effect attacks. So, the way I run it, it's still largely ancient and medieval in terms of battlefield tactics, but late 19th century in terms of operations and grand strategy (if the Five Nations have equivalent organizations to General Staffs).
If I meant to imply I hand out magical machine guns, such was not my intention. As that is indeed silly and pushes the setting towards a place where no one wants to go. (Admittedly, I've done vehicle-mounted magical machine guns before, but I think that's a tolerable deviation due to the general scarcity of vehicles in Eberron.) "Arcane heavy arms" was meant a residual clause to catch all those non-mundane widgets that do more damage than mundane kit issued to the standard line troops. What they are is really anyone's guess, as I've used lightning-throwing crossbows, alchemical grenades, and scrolls to make everyone's lives more interesting. How much seepage of that kind of stuff you want into your warfighting is really dependant on how you view the foundations of the setting: Because Eberron's a world bulging with lots and lots of small magical effects, I think it's an inevitable result of the setting's logic that such things will creep into warfare and their accretion with make warfare start to resemble modern warfare more than not. (As the primary problem that the military men of that universe will deal with is mitigating against the amount of firepower which the enemy can bring to bear, which is much the same problem modern RL militaries deal with, though it is unquestionably a difference of scale.) But it's also cool to envision armies still duking it via sword-and-board on a titanic scale.
Also, crossbows kind of stink as substitutes for muskets; I actually imagine crossbow volleys as more akin to a light artillery barrage, rather than a musket volley, since while the range on a crossbow is great, it only achieves that range by indirect fire (after all, crossbows can fire over walls!). Although I doubt that individual field armies would ever grow into the millions (why would you do that anyway, when a few hundred thousand is very large and much easier to maneuver), the formations could still be quite large, much larger than Roman or Medieval armies (probably close to Napoleon, it's true).
If you go by RL standards, yes, crossbows are inferior to muskets. But mechanically? No so much in 3.x, where they operate off the same mechanics and the range differntial between crossbows and muskets is on the order of 15% in the latter's favor, while the former are simple weapons instead of exotic. Does that make much sense? Not particularly, but if we assume that the world is broadly governed by the rules that constrain players, there you go. (Yes, yes, I know 4e got away from this. Which has its own benefits and problems.) More generally, this is why I made reference to hand-waving: We have no idea what a crossbow in Khorvaire looks like, let alone how it performs, so it's rather fruitless to try and object to it on the basis of realism. Need a crossbow that's got decent direct-fire performance? Cue technobabble about alchemically treated magebred animal sinew providing the requisite energy storage medium!
And while I did envision a good deal of combat occurring at fifty yards of so with direct-fire volles, I always imagined traditional crossbow volleying to remain an feature of the battlefield, in a suppressive fire role. One unit volleys onto opposing units, while a second advances. The second, in turn, volleys while the first advances. A kind of operational shoot-and-scoot.
One unit volleys onto opposing units, while a second advances. The second, in turn, volleys while the first advances. A kind of operational shoot-and-scoot.
While the rest of your post is very good at clarifying what you meant, I just wanted to focus on this bit for a second; I like it, a lot. I actually hadn't thought of them using them in that way (since traditional missile weapon volleys weren't really used to aid maneuver on the battlefield in ye olden days, to my knowledge, but just to demoralize and otherwise cause attrition and break up enemy formations).
I still prefer less tactical magic in my Eberron, and more spells used to solve operational problems (used en masse, anyway; special operators would definitely have all of the awesome magical powers that player characters have). I always run it as if, even with a heavily populated Khorvaire, mages are still quite rare, and the skills needed to train even a simple magewright to perform a single magical task is so involved and takes so much time that even if you have thousands of them trained and ready to go, putting them into a position where they can suffer high attrition rates seems like folly.
While, indeed, Aundair outfitting an entire Wand Regiment as something akin to musketeers might give them an edge during a battle, significant losses to that regiment would be very difficult to replace. I think using mages more like advisors on strategy and as something like engineers is definitely the superior use of them as a resource.
Also, I would just like to point out that the size of the armies during the Last War might provoke the breaking down of forces into smaller units of maneuver all on it's own, since there may be a need to spread one's forces thinner in order to counter the ability of an opponent in large numbers to conduct many operations in tandem. Just a thought; I don't really have any basis for it at the moment.
(Note that this idea requires excellent intelligence and communication, both of which can be provided magically in Eberron)
What do you guys think of that? (I just came up with it in the space about about 20 minutes, so be gentle)
While the rest of your post is very good at clarifying what you meant, I just wanted to focus on this bit for a second; I like it, a lot. I actually hadn't thought of them using them in that way (since traditional missile weapon volleys weren't really used to aid maneuver on the battlefield in ye olden days, to my knowledge, but just to demoralize and otherwise cause attrition and break up enemy formations).
Volleys were typically useless in Ye Olde Days as an actual combat maneuver due to a commander's inability to control it once it had been initiated: All the problems that afflicted the combatants re: artillery in WW1 would pertain to trying to direct a volley once the battle was joined. With the advent of magic and simple spells like message? It becomes possible to transmit and receive information fast enough for the volley to be brought to bear where it's needed. The above mention of message nicely encapsulates how one should go about trying to leaven Eberron's militaries with the fantastic: Identify a particular problem faced, track down how it was dealt with IRL, then attune the solution to achieve the right degree of fantasy.
I still prefer less tactical magic in my Eberron, and more spells used to solve operational problems (used en masse, anyway; special operators would definitely have all of the awesome magical powers that player characters have). I always run it as if, even with a heavily populated Khorvaire, mages are still quite rare, and the skills needed to train even a simple magewright to perform a single magical task is so involved and takes so much time that even if you have thousands of them trained and ready to go, putting them into a position where they can suffer high attrition rates seems like folly.
There're two more foundational issues here that don't often get touched on in Eberron: How hard is it to produce a spellcaster? And how hard is it to produce a magewright? I concur with the estimate that the ability to be a full-bore arcanist ought to be relatively rare: Let's call the natural potential to be such 1-in-1,000, on average. (In practice, I'd say that that's about right Karrnath and Breland, with Aundair's being an order of magnitude more common, Cyre's being perhaps thrice as common, and Thrane's being a goodly amount less common.) On the magewright issue, I suspect we have substantively different views. As magic is a science in Eberron -- in the sense that it can be studied and perfected by any student of sufficient skill -- and there widespread use of lots of small amounts of magic, I always pegged magewrighting as something that was relatively easy to pick-up, not much more difficult than other, similar smithing trades. I always pegged the number of folks who could, if life afforded them the opportunity to become a magewright, actually do so at 1-in-5 or so. Assuming that military magewrighting was turned in an MOS-type school, it becomes possible to deploy some manner of magic down at fairly low echelons. Which is what my goal really is, as grunts dealing with magic is far more in-line with where I want the Last War to be. You tweak the numbers and difficulty required to produce a magewright and you can get results to suit any taste.
While, indeed, Aundair outfitting an entire Wand Regiment as something akin to musketeers might give them an edge during a battle, significant losses to that regiment would be very difficult to replace. I think using mages more like advisors on strategy and as something like engineers is definitely the superior use of them as a resource.
I would note that I never thought that the term "wand regiment" meant that the entire regiment was composed of mages or magewrights. Rather, the term "wand" is added as a method of distinguishing similar formations, a la how "armored", "mechanized infantry", "light infantry" and so on are added. A wand regiment will still possess sizable amounts of infantry marching to battle with entirely conventional gear, just with an arcane component that is out-sized compared to that of a foot regiment.
On the issue of infiltration tactics, I'd note that without artillery, the defenders probably lose more than the attackers: Your only good ways to blast at your enemies as they cross over open ground in this type setting are with magic, and your magical resources will deplete themselves fairly quickly in an attempted breach. Similarly, without modern ranged weaponry, that the attackers are predominantly with melee weapons is of less import.
Really, what defenders want to do is bog down and attrite the enemy as much a storming enemy as much as possible, so that they can be dispatched of with conventional ranged weapons and the usage of magical force can be economized. As the good Mr. Baker said in another thread, he's envisioned artifice landmines in the setting, which go towards the attriting end of the spectrum. I've always wanted to run with the idea of steelvine, which is basically warforged barbed wire: It's about 90-10 on the living/construct axis, with its construct nature coming entirely from the fact that it doesn't age or require feeding. Stuff just reflexively coils around anything that touches, constricting tighter the more it's resisted against. (And which naturally reattaches to its severed strands hours later, troll-like, whenever it's cut.) Which goes towards an interesting idea on the "bogging them down" front. Though I'm sure other neat widgets could, and will, be devised.
And hey, once you get warforged barbed wire and magical landmines, you've got an excuse to adopt infiltration tactics.
The idea of "steelvine," Juums, is yet another wonderful idea to come out of your mind. Why does the "living" part of living have to always come from mammels? Why not plants? Very nice.
His Infernal Bovinity has given his views as to the commonality of magical ability, but I can't remember what they were off the top of my head.
As for the lack of artillery, well, remember that there are "siege staffs," which were apparently Up To The DM To Decide how common they were, and how powerful. Alternately, there's always mundane catapults with arcane or alchemical payloads.
Do people really feel that pre-Last War military was all that advanced and well-suited to actual large scale warfare? If I remember correctly, the kingdom had not seen any large scale warfare in centuries and fighting bands of monsterous humanoids, small scale rebellions and infamous pirate captains is not exactly the same. If in RL generals have trouble adjusting battlefield tactics leading to the odd situations in WWI even though the American Civil War already gave very clear signals that tactics needed to change (at least that is what I saw yesterday on a National Geographic show on the development of guns in large scale warfare) and that was in an era with several large scale wars within decades of one another. An army organized according to Rekkenmark teached tactics might very well have done real badly in the beginning years.
Remember that the Last War lasted over 100 years, so even if this is true (I tend to think so), by the end of the war all Five Nations would have learned (the hard way) what worked and what didn't.
Nevertheless, Madfox does raise a good point about pre- and early-war Rekkenmark doctrine. Would they have necessairly had preparations for large-scale warfare, when there were no enemy nation-states to fight? I doubt it. It gives more reason to assume that the Five Nations did not develop a staff system.
However, as Jaster points out, by the mid- to late-war, the nations would have learned. Just like in WWI, we see adaptations start happening in...what, 1915? 1916? By 1918, the war has drastically changed character.
The example I'm working on for my games right now is the King's Citadel in Breland; in my Eberron, the Citadel is not only the personal guard and intelligence group of the Brelish Crown, it is actually the whole military/intelligence organization in totality (at least the professionals; so referring to "the Citadel" in my Breland is rather like how Americans refer to "the Pentagon"). The King's Swords are the professional field army, and King's Shields are the gendarmerie, and the King's Wands are the professional war wizards of Breland (following more the higher-level "engineering" and advisory role I prefer for war wizards). This means that, effectively, the King's brother (I think?) is the Brelish Chief of Staff.
I imagined the Knight's Arcane would serve a similar role in Aundair, and that while the Emerald Claw was in the Crown's favor in Karrnath, that they would also be this (although I'm not sure what has replaced them). I'm not so sure about Thrane.
Do people really feel that pre-Last War military was all that advanced and well-suited to actual large scale warfare? If I remember correctly, the kingdom had not seen any large scale warfare in centuries and fighting bands of monsterous humanoids, small scale rebellions and infamous pirate captains is not exactly the same. If in RL generals have trouble adjusting battlefield tactics leading to the odd situations in WWI even though the American Civil War already gave very clear signals that tactics needed to change (at least that is what I saw yesterday on a National Geographic show on the development of guns in large scale warfare) and that was in an era with several large scale wars within decades of one another. An army organized according to Rekkenmark teached tactics might very well have done real badly in the beginning years.
I think that's a little of a misreading of the history of WW1 generalship: The problem wasn't so much that the commanders of the combatant nations had trouble adapting to the rigors of trench warfare, but that the technical means to overcome it were beyond their grasp. (Keegan makes a lot of hay out of this in his seminal one-volume history of the conflict, in establishing the central cause for the breakdown of every major offensive on the Western Front after the Battle of the Marne to the Kaiserschlacht can be attributed to the breakdown in communications that invariably occurred after the attackers left their trenches.) It's important to remember, even in spite of the problems faced, both the Central Powers and the Allies eventually developed workarounds to break the stalemate and return to the conflict to open warfare: The Central Powers did it through the operational methodology of Breakthrough Bruchmuller, while the Allies put their suppressive fire platforms on tracks and sent them rolling at the enemy.
I would agree that, in 894 A.K., that the combatant nations were unfit to raise and deploy the kinds of large formations discussed previously in this thread. I'll even credit Forge of War where it is due: The kind of small, essentially medieval armies it depicts are what I envisioned those of the very early Last War to be. But a century is a long time: In the real world, such took us from Waterloo to Verdun, after all. A century of warfare would likely produce all manner of tactical and operational innovations which advanced away from the traditional quasi-medieval warfare of prior to 894. I've always thought that a corollary would be that the pressures created by such innovations would mirror those of the real-world, which would push warfare in a direction that is recognizable to the modern viewer.
Nevertheless, Madfox does raise a good point about pre- and early-war Rekkenmark doctrine. Would they have necessairly had preparations for large-scale warfare, when there were no enemy nation-states to fight? I doubt it. It gives more reason to assume that the Five Nations did not develop a staff system.
I would argue that it really depends upon how one envisions the military apparatus of the Galifarn state. As I mentioned earlier in the thread, I'd say that by the start of the Last War, Jarot I had created a staffing system to prepare for the invasion by the dragons, demons, and/or psychic lobster assassins that haunted his dreams. I also believe that such a staffing system predated Jarot I due to the peculiar nature of the Galifarn military. I've tended to imagine Galifar's military as being a federal one: Given that Galifar's government is essentially federal, I envisioned that the military would be so as well, with the imperial army being a largely constabulary force backed by much larger national militia and auxilary elements. A general staffing system of some kind would be required to coordinate and integrate imperial and national forces to confront any challenge that was sufficient to justify the mobilization of the latter. But if you have a different reading on the nature of the Galifarn army, then it's easy enough to come to the conclusion there's no need for a general staff.
As for the lack of artillery, well, remember that there are "siege staffs," which were apparently Up To The DM To Decide how common they were, and how powerful. Alternately, there's always mundane catapults with arcane or alchemical payloads.
My comment about the lack of artillery was not aimed at the lack of artillery, per se. I know that's an obtuse way of saying it, but here goes: I know that artillery exists in Eberron, in both the form of siege staffs and conventional siege engines. But artillery as we conceive of it -- as a battlefield tool -- does not really exist. Siege engines lack the operational mobility to keep pace with marching columns and, even if they could keep up, require too much time to emplace, load, and sight to be able to make much of a difference on an active battlefield. (For a defender, the loading and sighting issue remain a problem, even if you can get them setup at your static defensive position.) Siege staffs can get by the problems of operational mobility and setup time, but given the nature of magical weaponry, it seems unlikely that they'd be able to do one or two rounds per minute for as long as the staff's crew can train the weapon. Or, as required by burst usage, six or eight.
Which, I think, is a good thing. As vital as artillery is to modern warfare in the real-world, it's very much a buzzkill. ("Okay, I activate my cannon, and it deals 10d6 damage to everything within 25' of where its shell fell. Oh, and I've got hundreds of them, with much overlap in shell fall radii. And I do this every other round.") The lack of battlefield artillery opens up a niche for war mages, one which is not readily duplicated by the proliferation of low-level spells and one which justifies the expenditure of scarce magical talent. But everyone's got their own views on that sort of thing, I suspect.
I think that's a little of a misreading of the history of WW1 generalship: The problem wasn't so much that the commanders of the combatant nations had trouble adapting to the rigors of trench warfare, but that the technical means to overcome it were beyond their grasp.
Isn't that it a bit easy as an assumption as well? They kept sending their soldiers through nobodies country to the other side despite the fact that virtually no soldier ever reached the other side.
As for the American Civil War and Europe, yeah, that is why I mentioned the other large scale wars in Europe that showed the same signs. I am well aware of the Crimean War, the war between Germany and France and so on ;)
I would agree that, in 894 A.K., that the combatant nations were unfit to raise and deploy the kinds of large formations discussed previously in this thread. I'll even credit Forge of War where it is due: The kind of small, essentially medieval armies it depicts are what I envisioned those of the very early Last War to be. But a century is a long time: In the real world, such took us from Waterloo to Verdun, after all. A century of warfare would likely produce all manner of tactical and operational innovations which advanced away from the traditional quasi-medieval warfare of prior to 894. I've always thought that a corollary would be that the pressures created by such innovations would mirror those of the real-world, which would push warfare in a direction that is recognizable to the modern viewer.
Actually, that depends entirely on the era in RL you are looking at. The battlefield changed immensely between Waterloo en Verdun, but at the same time, if you look at some of the earlier Medieval European wars that lasted decades (the 100-year war between France and England, the 80-year war between the Netherlands and Spain) there were some innovations it comes nowere near the changes between Napoleon and WWI (let alone between the start of WWI and 2010). It all depends on how fast you think magical technologies develop(ed) in Eberron. Personally I am somewhat inclined to belief, developments are/were actually not that fast in Gallifar, certainly not as fast as in RL. It is not as if for example the airships or warforged are purely a Gallifar invention. The gnomes/dragonmarked houses needed to steal the basic principals from the ruins in Xen'drik.
My comment about the lack of artillery was not aimed at the lack of artillery, per se. I know that's an obtuse way of saying it, but here goes: I know that artillery exists in Eberron, in both the form of siege staffs and conventional siege engines. But artillery as we conceive of it -- as a battlefield tool -- does not really exist. Siege engines lack the operational mobility to keep pace with marching columns and, even if they could keep up, require too much time to emplace, load, and sight to be able to make much of a difference on an active battlefield. (For a defender, the loading and sighting issue remain a problem, even if you can get them setup at your static defensive position.) Siege staffs can get by the problems of operational mobility and setup time, but given the nature of magical weaponry, it seems unlikely that they'd be able to do one or two rounds per minute for as long as the staff's crew can train the weapon. Or, as required by burst usage, six or eight.
Which, I think, is a good thing. As vital as artillery is to modern warfare in the real-world, it's very much a buzzkill. ("Okay, I activate my cannon, and it deals 10d6 damage to everything within 25' of where its shell fell. Oh, and I've got hundreds of them, with much overlap in shell fall radii. And I do this every other round.") The lack of battlefield artillery opens up a niche for war mages, one which is not readily duplicated by the proliferation of low-level spells and one which justifies the expenditure of scarce magical talent. But everyone's got their own views on that sort of thing, I suspect.
True. I always considered warmarges to be THE artillery. It is a reason why I often design fortresses in Eberron (and my own fantasy settings where mages are relatively common) as 17th-century fortresses. Then again, I have more examples of those kind of fortresses just around the corner (living right next to the Waterline defenses of the Netherlands), so it is much easier for me to create those than Medieval stone castles ;)
Isn't that it a bit easy as an assumption as well? They kept sending their soldiers through nobodies country to the other side despite the fact that virtually no soldier ever reached the other side.
If you do any detailed study of the First World War, you'll find that every major offensive that those generals unleashed were attempts to overcome the stalemate of the trenches. Nowhere did they just "send them over the top" without trying some new method that they (erroneously) believed would allow them to break their opponent's defenses and enter their rear area. The myth that these men just threw endless waves of infantry against impenetrable fortifications, despite "obvious" signs that this would not work is a little irritating, honestly.
Juums, I just finished rereading Keegan's book! What a coincidence!
Actually, that depends entirely on the era in RL you are looking at. The battlefield changed immensely between Waterloo en Verdun, but at the same time, if you look at some of the earlier Medieval European wars that lasted decades (the 100-year war between France and England, the 80-year war between the Netherlands and Spain) there were some innovations it comes nowere near the changes between Napoleon and WWI (let alone between the start of WWI and 2010). It all depends on how fast you think magical technologies develop(ed) in Eberron. Personally I am somewhat inclined to belief, developments are/were actually not that fast in Gallifar, certainly not as fast as in RL. It is not as if for example the airships or warforged are purely a Gallifar invention. The gnomes/dragonmarked houses needed to steal the basic principals from the ruins in Xen'drik.
This is one of those impossible-to-reconcile arguments about Eberron; clearly, their technical capabilities give them a late 18th or early 19th century level of sophistication in finance, government, and so on, but some people hang on desperately to the notion that these things will not affect military developments dramatically. It's fine if you want to run it that way, I'm not even saying it's foolish or anything, but I definitely feel that playing it as straight as possible forces one to recognize that it just couldn't be medieval, even if it isn't really analogous to modern Earth. Just remember that with new technologies (or "magics", if you insist) often warfare changes first.
Then again, I have more examples of those kind of fortresses just around the corner (living right next to the Waterline defenses of the Netherlands), so it is much easier for me to create those than Medieval stone castles ;)
That's actually really cool. Sometimes it saddens me that I live in a very urbanized (or, sub-urbanized) part of the United States that doesn't really have any examples of major fortresses (I'm a few hours from Ft. McHenry, though). For all the reading I've done about them, I've never actually seen anything more than a (reconstructed) frontier fortification made primarily of wood.
The myth that these men just threw endless waves of infantry against impenetrable fortifications, despite "obvious" signs that this would not work is a little irritating, honestly.
Just quoting recent National Geographic documentary and some other reasonably modern reports on specific battles. I am not going to double check the sources, at least not when just dealing with a D&D campaign where facts will always take a backseat to the fun for the players. I know that in general National Geograhic documentaries tend to give a one sided view offering stuff as facts even when debated by scholars, although I would be equally critical to base another opinion on one source as well. Fact is that history is not a hard science ;)
This is one of those impossible-to-reconcile arguments about Eberron; clearly, their technical capabilities give them a late 18th or early 19th century level of sophistication in finance, government, and so on, but some people hang on desperately to the notion that these things will not affect military developments dramatically. It's fine if you want to run it that way, I'm not even saying it's foolish or anything, but I definitely feel that playing it as straight as possible forces one to recognize that it just couldn't be medieval, even if it isn't really analogous to modern Earth. Just remember that with new technologies (or "magics", if you insist) often warfare changes first.
Now you are putting words in my mouth. I never said anything about whatever current technical, let alone social, capabilities Eberron society had/has. I said that your conclusion that just because in RL history things changed significantly between Napoleon and WWI does not mean in Eberron something similar would (have) happen(ed). Mind you, I do not agree with your conclusion that developments in one area, automatically means a similar development in another area. I know of too many examples in RL where various advancements work independently of one another, especially if society takes a negative view on certain subjects (e.g. at one point China had a very advanced navigation and ship technology, but when society took a dim view on it, it took only a decade or so to get all knowledge on those subjects to be lost), but that was not my point ;)
Personally I do not care all that much about the organizational, let alone technological, details of the Khorvairian military. I want to tell a fun story, that is recognizable at some level by my players and fun for my players. Since I have never run across a group of players who actually like the strict hierarchies of the military, and D&D is not designed for mass warfare, all war has ever been in my campaigns is as a background to add color and maybe explain why the authorities hire the PCs to deal with a problem as opposed to sending in more reliable military ;) I do like discussing these subjects though ;)
That's actually really cool. Sometimes it saddens me that I live in a very urbanized (or, sub-urbanized) part of the United States that doesn't really have any examples of major fortresses (I'm a few hours from Ft. McHenry, though). For all the reading I've done about them, I've never actually seen anything more than a (reconstructed) frontier fortification made primarily of wood.
Does that actually have anything to do with being in an urbanized region? I would think it has more to do with the fact you are living in the USA ;) I certainly live in a very urbanized region myself. I don't think your country ever faced a constant threat of invasion from large scale armies for more than a few years. Building a line of fortresses, and utilizing the environment to such an extend as the Dutch did, is extremely expensive and something you only do when you belief it is worthwhile (and the local environment certainly helped making it worthwhile). It was also the constant threat of war that kept it worthwhile to keep up and improve upon the defenses instead of using them to build new houses and factories.
While your statement about China is arguable (the loss of ocean-going shipbuilding technology was actually the dictate of a single man, the Emperor, and not a decision by Chiness society at-large to abandon ocean-going ships), century-long wars where the combatants don't take advantage of all available capabilities to defeat their opponents (in what appears to be a total war) would be one hell of a handwave. If you want to do that, fine, but making a blanket statement that a society with trains, airships, and what amounts to magical telegraph wouldn't use them in warfare when they offer solutions to very common military problems is quite a stretch.
Personally I honestly do not care all that much about the organizational, let alone technological, details of the Khorvairian military. I want to tell a fun story, that is recognizable at some level by my players and fun for my players. Since I have never run across a group of players who actually like the strict hierarchies of the military, and D&D is not designed for mass warfare, all war has ever been in my campaigns is as a background to add color and maybe explain why the authorities hire the PCs to deal with a problem as opposed to sending in more reliable military
And it's fine that you don't. I didn't say you had to. You freely participated in a thread where this was actually the intended subject (I know because I started it). If you thought it was meant to be something else, I apologize for misleading you. Again, I never said you had to run it the way I've been describing it. You can do what you want. And you stepping in to remind everyone that it's just a game and the whole thread is irrelevant really grinds my gears. We know it's irrelevant. It's just a form of escapism for military history nerds, who also happen to be D&D nerds, to blow off some steam. Please don't ruin the fun by jolting us back to reality. It's jarring.
While your statement about China is arguable (the loss of ocean-going shipbuilding technology was actually the dictate of a single man, the Emperor, and not a decision by Chiness society at-large to abandon ocean-going ships), century-long wars where the combatants don't take advantage of all available capabilities to defeat their opponents (in what appears to be a total war) would be one hell of a handwave. If you want to do that, fine, but making a blanket statement that a society with trains, airships, and what amounts to magical telegraph wouldn't use them in warfare when they offer solutions to very common military problems is quite a stretch.
Maybe, but I just think you need to be careful with drawing paralels with RL. Eberron's technological and societal advancements just do not follow RL earth at all. Just look at transportation for example, on the one hand we have types of transportation only dreamed of in RL (teleportation circles, vaults that can be accessed from all over the continent), stuff that is about on the same level, although a bit slower (airships) and stuff that is far behind (lightning rail, still using horse and wagons). Something similar you see in military technology with warforged and floating fortresses being of a sophistication that we can only dream off (sometimes the dreams are nightmares ;)) while the common infantry still uses swords, pikes and plate.
A note on China: I am aware it was a dictate by one man, but I could argue that it was society that allowed one man to make that dictate ;) Of course, the example still stands of something that could have happened in pre-war Gallifar. The assurtion that just because Gallifar was a big well organized nation with a paranoid king obsessed with defenses would create a more modern organized military is just as much an assumption than that it would not have happened. Would a paranoid ruler obsessed with power really risk handing over control over the military to a central organizational structure?
Maybe, but I just think you need to be careful with drawing paralels with RL. Eberron's technological and societal advancements just do not follow RL earth at all. Just look at transportation for example, on the one hand we have types of transportation only dreamed of in RL (teleportation circles, vaults that can be accessed from all over the continent), stuff that is about on the same level, although a bit slower (airships) and stuff that is far behind (lightning rail, still using horse and wagons). Something similar you see in military technology with warforged and floating fortresses being of a sophistication that we can only dream off (sometimes the dreams are nightmares ;)) while the common infantry still uses swords, pikes and plate.
It's not true that Eberron's technological and societal developments don't follow RL at all. Many aspects of Eberron are directly analogous to real life; many are not. I already conceded that Eberron will not look like modern Earth; but parallels are obvious. They are obvious because we recognize them.
The Lightning Rail is a fantasy train, and it serves the same purpose. Elemental Airships are directly analogous to real life lighter-than-air aircraft, and they also serve the same purpose. House Sivis can provide services that are directly analogous to real telegraph services, and it's easy to recognize them as such.
I'm going to second the frusteration with the "over the top, fire and forgot" characterization of WWI. As Juums pointed out, the big problem was that communications with the attacking force was lost once they got a few hundred yards from their trenches. Due to the lack of wireless, the only means of communications they had were....carrier pigeon (hardly reliable), courier (still a moving target), trying to drag a bloody telegraph wire across no-man's-land (not exactly feasible), or....what, flares? Just wait it out?
That's why various types of barrages were developed, and fairly complicated fire plans. You read them, and you see dizzying combinations of creeping barrages and box barrages, to try to give the infantry planned fire support. The thing is, though, they need fire support when they need it, not when the plan thinks they need it.
Actually, funny fact here, that I learned from one of my professors who specilized in WWI (big time; he's on the editorial board for the World War I scholarly journal). Of the five years of World War I, namely part of 1914, 1915-1917, and most of 1918, care to guess which two years were the bloodiest?
1914 and 1918. Why? They were out of the trenches.
The "blindly throwing men into machinegun fire" is an example of a constructed myth. Heavily simplified, its hard for the common person, especially the trooper, to reconcile the losses incurred throughout the war seemingly without gain, the grinding attrition, and the constant failure to break through even with the Newest And Greatest Idea, with anything approaching praise. So, this myth of uncaring, callous officers who sent men to their deaths on a whim was constructed to explain it. However, when you look at it critically, well, you see these things. Perversely, part of the reason there is a big surge in WWI history is because the veterans are all dead, so there's no emotions to get in the way; only facts and interpritation.
In any case. Reconciling the socioeconomic and pseudotechnological advances in Eberron with their military is part of the curse and the blessing of Eberron. I mean, sure, we have oodles of discussions trying to hammer these things out, but I feel that these just add to the character of Eberron. I mean, how many "ooo! that's a great idea!" moments have we had in this thread alone?
Furthermore, the mutability of these reconciliations allows Eberron to be surprisingly flexible. I mean, with very little effort, we can run our Eberrons on a wide spectrum of sophistication, ranging from "just a little more magical than the average" to a sort of "Victorian-Diesal Magicpunk." (Though, sadly with less corsets.)
I'm a fan of that flexibility. Furthermore, I feel that by these discussions, we each contribute something that will make these iterations of Eberron feel more alive. Sure, Madfox, the Last War is a backdrop. I'd run it that way too. However, when there's an oppurtunity to make the PCs take notice of the backdrop, well, then it feels like a world, rather than just scenery. My avowed love for the "Karrnathi Risen Patriots" designation of undead units is one example of this; a simple, evocative designation that really captures the feel of the units, and of the nation.
Anyways. I'm going to stop pontificating. What are we discussing now?
It's not true that Eberron's technological and societal developments don't follow RL at all. Many aspects of Eberron are directly analogous to real life; many are not. I already conceded that Eberron will not look like modern Earth; but parallels are obvious. They are obvious because we recognize them.
The Lightning Rail is a fantasy train, and it serves the same purpose. Elemental Airships are directly analogous to real life lighter-than-air aircraft, and they also serve the same purpose. House Sivis can provide services that are directly analogous to real telegraph services, and it's easy to recognize them as such.
It is not the fact that they are not analogous to RL that I am arguing*, it is the fact that it is a bit risky to conclude that because they are analogous the impact is the same. In RL these developments did not come on their own. We simply do not know how modern wireless communications would impact a battlefield where the soldiers were using 17th century weapon technologies (with wizards taking on the role of muskets and canons). We only had them when machine guns, artillery with a range of miles and airplanes were a fact of life.
* Although I could argue that is not entirely true. In Eberron operating one of these products is impractical without a dragonmark. If there are as many NPCs with both a dragonmark and the right aptitude as in RL there are people with the skill/talents and aptitude to operate these things than yes, they are analogous. If not, than things will develop completely different from RL. Hack, the presence of the Dragonmarked Houses has aboslutely no RL anology to draw upon. RL global companies are a relatively new appearance, and as of yet they have nowhere near the same influence (unless you happen to be a lot more cynical than I am ;))
Other than that, I agree with Ogiwan. I just feel that if we want to speculate on how Eberron would look like, it is important for the discussion to take those differences into account just as much as we need to take the anologies into account.
It is not the fact that they are not analogous to RL that I am arguing*, it is the fact that it is a bit risky to conclude that because they are analogous the impact is the same. In RL these developments did not come on their own. We simply do not know how modern wireless communications would impact a battlefield where the soldiers were using 17th century weapon technologies (with wizards taking on the role of muskets and canons). We only had them when machine guns, artillery with a range of miles and airplanes were a fact of life.
What has undergird a lot of the discussion in this thread is what undergirds the paleontologic enterprise: What generally holds today will have held yesterday. Here, we are starting with our real-life experiences with a mid-Nineteenth to early-Twentieth Century "technical" base and extrapolating backwards as to how that applies to Eberron. One phenomenon of that is the sizes of formations will grow to the maximum which can be accommodated by the C3 infrastructure: Given that the magical telegraph of House Sivis is canonical, army sizes can safely be said to grow at least to the levels seen in the Wars of Italian and German Unification if that is your thematic inclination. If one develops that even further, as I kicked around earlier, into a form of magical radio through use of message stones or rituals, then you would conceivably see movement towards a post-WW1-style of maneuvering, as devolved communications allow for more complex and responsive battlefield maneuvering. This does not mean that we're to open warfare on the Russian steppe, because "magical radio" is not really a true radio analogue: The downtimes on messaging are not-insubstantial and the amount that can be transmitted is highly restricted. But it's also a heck of a lot better than the eight-hours one-way it took a runner to bring information from battalion HQ to Haig's eyes at the Somme.
As Ogiwan said, though, everyone can read their own biases into the Last War. Which is why Eberron is such a fun setting.
* Although I could argue that is not entirely true. In Eberron operating one of these products is impractical without a dragonmark. If there are as many NPCs with both a dragonmark and the right aptitude as in RL there are people with the skill/talents and aptitude to operate these things than yes, they are analogous. If not, than things will develop completely different from RL. Hack, the presence of the Dragonmarked Houses has aboslutely no RL anology to draw upon. RL global companies are a relatively new appearance, and as of yet they have nowhere near the same influence (unless you happen to be a lot more cynical than I am ;))
This is an opportune time for me to make a point I'd been meaning to, but hadn't yet found the right place for it. Victor Davis Hanson in A War Like No Other made the point that you cannot get to Alexander the Great and his conquests without first having the Peloponnesian War: That the fighting from 430-404 B.C. unleashed a military revolution whose byproducts eventually swept away the Persian Empire and remade history. The subtext of that, and much of the book, was that the Greeks, especially the more learned democracies and Athens in-particular, turned their creative energies toward warfare and fundamentally remade it to the point that by Aegospotami it would be unreconizable to Pericles' generation. The same happened, albeit on a massively more compact temporal scale, with all the combatants in the Great War. The lesson seeming to be that generally peacable commercial folk turn their attentions and energies to warfighting, the nature of war seems to change at an ever-accelerating rate.
It is against that backdrop that I always envisioned the Last War: Galifar was in many ways comparable to pre-Pearl Habor America, in the sense that it was a land concerned principally with commerce rather than warmaking, and its power structures reflected as much. This is how marching armies of 20,000 pike and crossbowmen in 894 A.K. can co-exist with armies consisting of tens of dozens of divisions that size a century later. The combatant states of the Last War were transformed in ways that none of them really grasp, and that only the longer-lived races can. I tended to envision the same for warfare, with an officer of the imperial army prior in 893 A.K. recognizing most of features of Galifar I's army, while the same officer would be dumbstruck by the degree of change in just two decades. Let alone towards the end of the war.
Victor Davis Hanson in A War Like No Other made the point that you cannot get to Alexander the Great and his conquests without first having the Peloponnesian War...
Bleh. No offense, but VDH isn't exactly quality. Hanson-bashing is pretty much sine que non in academia, and there have been a bajillion books and articles dedicated to knocking Hanson's work down. Quite successfully, in my eyes.
It is against that backdrop that I always envisioned the Last War: Galifar was in many ways comparable to pre-Pearl Habor America, in the sense that it was a land concerned principally with commerce rather than warmaking, and its power structures reflected as much. This is how marching armies of 20,000 pike and crossbowmen in 894 A.K. can co-exist with armies consisting of tens of dozens of divisions that size a century later. The combatant states of the Last War were transformed in ways that none of them really grasp, and that only the longer-lived races can. I tended to envision the same for warfare, with an officer of the imperial army prior in 893 A.K. recognizing most of features of Galifar I's army, while the same officer would be dumbstruck by the degree of change in just two decades. Let alone towards the end of the war.
This I have to agree with.
Of course, the exact nature of that change is up to us DMs.
So....should we come up with a name for ourselves? All I got is "Last War Grognards"
Bleh. No offense, but VDH isn't exactly quality. Hanson-bashing is pretty much sine que non in academia, and there have been a bajillion books and articles dedicated to knocking Hanson's work down. Quite successfully, in my eyes.
I can't help but wonder how much of that is due to his extracurricular activities: Lord knows he made no friends with Mexifornia. But if it weren't for him, I'd've never read Thucydides. Or Xenophon. (Though I still regret the latter.)
So....should we come up with a name for ourselves? All I got is "Last War Grognards"
Nay, nay, a thousand times nay! I demand a full rum ration. None of this watered down stuff.
I can't help but wonder how much of that is due to his extracurricular activities: Lord knows he made no friends with Mexifornia.
Actually, a lot of the hate is because of the whole "Western Way of War" thesis. John Lynn's Battle starts out refuting Hanson vis a vis the Greeks, and then the rest of the book hammers at Hanson's divide between "Oriental" forces that focus on deception and maneuver and "Western" forces that focus on pitched engagements. Sure, Hanson has some good ideas, especially in The Western Way of War, but the central thesis is horribly flawed.
But if it weren't for him, I'd've never read Thucydides. Or Xenophon. (Though I still regret the latter.)
Hah. I had to read Xenophon for class. I made a motivational poster: i229.photobucket.com/albums/ee11/Ogiwan8...
So....should we come up with a name for ourselves? All I got is "Last War Grognards"
Nay, nay, a thousand times nay! I demand a full rum ration. None of this watered down stuff.
Grognard isn't actually related to the drink at all. Les Grognards is actually an appelation applied to the Napoleonic Old Guard, meaning, "The Grumblers," so called since they were the only ones permitted to grumble within earshot of Napoleon. Due to the origins of Napoleonic wargames in the wargaming community, "grognard" has also come to mean an experienced gamer, or very knowledgeable one. Or just a grumbler.
Actually, a lot of the hate is because of the whole "Western Way of War" thesis. John Lynn's Battle starts out refuting Hanson vis a vis the Greeks, and then the rest of the book hammers at Hanson's divide between "Oriental" forces that focus on deception and maneuver and "Western" forces that focus on pitched engagements. Sure, Hanson has some good ideas, especially in The Western Way of War, but the central thesis is horribly flawed.
Which is fair enough: I've always thought it was more a case of confusing correlation with causation, myself, as alluring as an "Occidental" warfighting paradigm is. Though it provides an interesting paradigm from a fantasy world-building perspective: If agrarian societies have a propensity to develop military organizations centered upon resource-intensive heavy infantry or cavalry and pitched battle, while non-or semi-agrarian ones tend to develop military organizations centered upon comparatively cheap light infantry or cavalry and raiding, then you go a fair distance towards providing a justifiable why for why your stock fantasy stable of orcs and goblinoids are always nomadic pillagers. (Other than "they're Chaotic Evil and are there for your PCs to kill," at any rate.)
To drag this back to Eberron, I'd expect that the notion of a "Galifarn" way of warfighting, as embodied through the form given to the armies of the Five Nations, and the need to escape Galifar's shadow would dog the militaries of the non-human nations which achieved independence after the Last War. As nationalist states, Darguun, Valenar, Zilargo, and the Mror Holds have to contend with the fact that the only organizational tools they have in their toolboxes were developed by their one-time human "oppressors" (as the nationalists undoubtedly decry at every opportunity, I'm sure!) and, the strategic stalemate not-withstanding, said organizational tools have proven effective enough to breed killing fields of sufficient horror that the dead still walk them. At the same time, all of them have to contend with the fact that they can't hope to stand-up to the Five Nations for one reason or another: Zilargo and the Mror Holds lack the demographic depth to incur the casualties that would be produced by actively confronting an army of the Five Nations; Darguun and Droamm lack the operational sophistication to maintain a coherent campaign; and Valenar, Talenta Plains, and the Eldeen Reaches suffer from both. (This isn't to say that they'd be steamrolled or would even necessarily lose: Merely that they cannot march their respective military forces out and into the open to oppose an army of the Five Nations. And, given that the armies of the Five Nations have been the schools of generalship for the past century, this poses problems for newly minted military establishments which were undoubtedly influenced, if not out-right trained, by the Five Nations.)
Ironically, if one accepts that individually each of the new nations is miltiarily inferior to any one of the Five Nations, then the entire Thronehold system is basd upon a presumption of mutual and reinforcing antagonism between Aundair, Breland, Karrnath, and Thrane: I.E. it's assumed that Aundair will not be able to simply mobilize the requisite force to reacquire the Eldeen Reaches at its leisure now that general war has passed, because one or more of the other remaining Five Nations wll oppose it. Things certainly would be made...interesting if Aundair, Breland, and Karrnath were to come to an "understanding" about mutual assistance in returning to their pre-war 894 A.K. borders, wouldn't they?
Hah. I had to read Xenophon for class. I made a motivational poster: i229.photobucket.com/albums/ee11/Ogiwan8...
Truth!
Grognard isn't actually related to the drink at all. Les Grognards is actually an appelation applied to the Napoleonic Old Guard, meaning, "The Grumblers," so called since they were the only ones permitted to grumble within earshot of Napoleon. Due to the origins of Napoleonic wargames in the wargaming community, "grognard" has also come to mean an experienced gamer, or very knowledgeable one. Or just a grumbler.
And now we get to why I stopped my academic study of history after getting my B.A.: The foreign language certification usually required to do anything beyond it proved an insurmountable hurdle. My monolingualism has given rise to a vocabulary which has more than once been referred to as Churchillian, but alas, it has doomed me to forever be perplexed by the tongues of foreigners. And my perplexion at this moment can be blamed on French. (My professor in my Nineteenth Century Europe class had the best comment I've ever seen on French: "That was a nice try at the pronounciation, but this is French: Even though there're seven letters in the word, only two of them can actually be voiced.") Alternately, I blame my never really being into tabletop wargaming. Either or!
Sign me up for joining the the Last War Grognards, though.
A final, utterly tangential thought, that relates to the notion of army sizes. If we accept that, following the first few years of the Last War, there's a steady uptick in the size of armies until, say, 965 A.K. or so when we're firmly in the "modern" era of Last War, we have something of a problem with an established canon element of the setting. To wit: Once you get to the point where you can mobilize million-man armies, the need and attractiveness of mercenaries diminishes greatly. Men and demihumans who fight for coin rather than a sense of duty or patriotism are both more expensive to maintain than conscripts or volunteers, as well as being willing to endure fewer privations or display less gallantry while under fire. And the mercenary trade is supposedly to be important both to the success of one of the dragonmarked houses and the formation of at least two nations. So how do we rehabilitate the mercenary trade without further dislocating things?
The following are simply some of the ideas I've had, along with some commentary for good measure:
1) House Deneith remains as it traditionally has been in terms of the provision of mercenaries, providing specialists and other capability gap-filling as needed, while concurrently being the entity to which conscription is delegated, undertaking the task of both actively recruiting for its employer's national army and enforcing whatever conscription laws are on its books while being paid per soldier it provides. I'm not particularly a fan of this approach, but that's because a recurrent theme of my own vision of the setting is a weakening of the dragonmarked houses relative to the state, with the conscription and recruitment bureaucracy simply being part of that. It also doesn't necessarily address the issue of mercenaries being of use, as it basically turns everyone who serves into a "mercenary" while the true mercenaries remain relatively small in number. (As a basic assumption of this sort of thing is that any nation capable of raising these kinds of formations is capable of providing the necessary skills to man them indigenously.)
2) House Denith runs what we shall call Force Economizers, Inc. One of the oft-reported issues in modern warfare is the "diminishing power of the offensive": As an army marches, its ability to bring sufficient force to win the day at the critical point is diluted by its need to detach its combat strength to invest bypassed enemy fortifications, man garrisons, patrol supply lines, maintain supply depots, and the like. House Deneith could provide ready-made formations to buyers to assume these tasks and free up units of the national army to counteract the offensive's naturally diminishing power. As the name of the entity suggests, it needn't simply cater to offensive action and could, just as easily, include assumption of things like lightning rail security details deep in the hinterland or th drudgery of staff work. I rather like this particular idea, as it provides a chance for large numbers -- in the tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands at a time, as contemplated by the sourcebooks -- to slosh around Khorvaire and still be decisive in the occasional battle. (A counterattack falls upon a key point that's either manned by mercenaries when none were supposed to be there and thus is frustrated, or which is manned by mercenaries instead of a first-rate line formation and thus routed by the superior force brought to bear, makes for how history is decided.)
3) House Deneith runs the Grand Emporium of Gallipolis, Isonzos, Salonikas, and Other Distracting Expeditions. This is something of the other hand of the aforementioned Force Economizers, Inc. and is really envisioned to go hand-and-hand with it. Because of the fact that the Last War was focused on succession to the throne of Galifar, and the heart of Galifar was the Five Nations, it is inevitable that its major theaters of operation will by in central Khorvaire: Along the Aundair-Thrane, Thrane-Breland, Breland-Cyre, and Cyre-Karrnath frontiers. But some of these frontiers are more prominent than others: Due to Thrane's capture of "Old" Breland and the favorability of the terrain, it's likely that Brelish efforts against Thrane would be centered on the line of the River Brey from Vathirond to the Lurching Tower. However, to keep maximal pressure against Thrane, Breland would also like to launch a two-pronged offensive, with the other prong launched west of Lake Brey and driven towards Fort Light or the string of cities around the Harrowing Crowns. Breland, however, also does not want to denude its primary cutting edge in the east: So it turns to House Deneith, which is in the business of furnishing reasonably large -- with multiple corps-sized elements available at any one time -- to put an army into the field in the west, freeing up Brelish forces for maximal effort in the east while concurrently attaining the goal of a two-pronged offensive. Such allows for Deneith to actually put significant numbers of mercenaries into the field, for them to do things, and for their actions to have consequences: A mercenary mutiny, or rout, even on a tertiary front can have serious impacts upon the course of a campaign. But it also keeps them in a secondary role, so that they do not overshadow the national militaries of the combatants, or foist upon the combatants a dependancy upon them. (Why yes, Forge of War, I am looking at you and your treatment of Cyre prior to the invention of warforged.)
I'm sure others have their own views on mercenaries: Admittedly, I'm very much a product of the modern world with something of a distaste for them, which is why in the vision above they're very much auxiliaries playing an important but minimal role in the combat of the Last War. But it's a starting place for the discussion of where they fit into the Last War when you have much, much larger manpower bases to play with.
Another important role I envision for mercs is that as security companies providing protection to private companies. This is the same as mercs in RL, especially in regions where local authorities have difficulties keeping order (e.g. Iraq).
As for the humanoids, remember that the Valenar and Darghuun goblins have ancient history to build upon with a society that for all intents and purposes was at least as well developed as Gallifar if not more advanced.
And now we get to why I stopped my academic study of history after getting my B.A.: The foreign language certification usually required to do anything beyond it proved an insurmountable hurdle.
To get your PhD, yes, you need to have 1-2 foreign languages, but not all places require that you have a foreign language for the Master's. I didn't need one for my MA. Whereabouts do you live? You might be close enough to a university that has a military history program, or if all else fails, you could try an online program. I wasn't a fan of my online classes, though. Compared to the seminar classes, the online classes just fell flat. Graduate history classes, though, are some of the most fun I've experienced. Its you and 8 people in a room, analyzing a book and debating about historical significance for a good 3 hours. Loads of fun.
Anyways. Madfox brings up a good point about the role that a mercenary's "home culture" and "Deneith cultureilization" would play in their unit cohesion and morale. That said, anybody play the Total War series? Specifically, Medieval 1 and 2, and Rome? Mercenaries were hella useful there, to 1.) Bolster an army, and 2.) Fill out shortcomings. Thrane is probably going to use mercs for heavy infantry, for example. Breland and Karrnath, I'm not sure what they'd pull mercs for, but i'm sure they could use them to round out. Aundair and Cyre, though, would probably use mercs to bolster their forces because they have such low populations.
That said, anybody play the Total War series? Specifically, Medieval 1 and 2, and Rome? Mercenaries were hella useful there, to 1.) Bolster an army, and 2.) Fill out shortcomings.
I used to play Rome: Total War for hours and hours at a time. I'd use mercenaries as garrison troops, mostly, or when I had a lot of cash on hand to build an enormous army very quickly in a province that was too far away for me to send some of my precious national forces. I'd drop a general in a remote province far behind the main theater, and by the time the enemy would respond I'd have a 20-stack army (or two) ravaging his rear, thus opening a second front. Occasionally I'd use them as specialist auxiliaries. I really enjoyed the peculiar mercenary mechanics of Rome.
As for the humanoids, remember that the Valenar and Darghuun goblins have ancient history to build upon with a society that for all intents and purposes was at least as well developed as Gallifar if not more advanced.
This somewhat misses the point: A civilization's age has little bearing on the efficacy of its warfighting methodology. Were that the case, our military vernacular would be dotted with Chinese, Hindi, and Farsi idioms for various modern military tools and techniques, rather than vice-versa.
The plight of the ancient civilizations of the east, upon being confronted by the technical and material superiority of the West in the Nineteenth Century, actually is the point of reference I was using for the tension I had previously described. In Darguun you have the scions of a fallen great empire, yearning to restore what was taken away from them millennia ago. To do that, one has to deal with the fact that human civilization has taken hold in much of the old empire and that, if we are adhering to the type of warfare generally discussed in this thread, is capable of marshalling staggering amounts of men and material to wage its battles. Given that Darguun birthed itself via the mercenary trade, while it possesses an abundant pool of trained soldiers, it lacks the economic base to deploy or equip forces on the scale required and also lacks the non-combat skillset to keep a proper force in the field. The human nations, however, do possess such a base and such a skillset. To be able to give life to the dream of recreating the Dhakaani Empire, Darguun will have to undergo so level of "modernization", which will invariably generate tension due to the forsaking of some elements of tradition to become more "human-like". While I'm a sucker for the old trope that all hobgoblins are samurai, the above is why I've always looked to Meiji Japan as good model for post-war Darguun.
Valenar faces a different a problem, and that is that the half-elven war clans were essentially steppe nomads. The steppe nomads made good soldiers: Their skills on horseback and with a bow were second-to-none, and that is why we still talk about the Mongols and Tartars to this day. Valenar doubles down on that by overlaying a Sparta-esque warrior culture that guarantees their expertise with their complex racial fighting style. Despite the competencies, however, history has been fairly unkind to the tactics of the steppe nomads, as the history of Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century Russia tell us. I would argue that, in post-war Valenar, one of the major political hot buttons is the necessity of military modernization, due to the steady out-moding of the war clan system by the Last War and the fact that any modernization will require up-ending the war clan system, with all the societal dislocation that'd produce.
To get your PhD, yes, you need to have 1-2 foreign languages, but not all places require that you have a foreign language for the Master's. I didn't need one for my MA. Whereabouts do you live? You might be close enough to a university that has a military history program, or if all else fails, you could try an online program. I wasn't a fan of my online classes, though. Compared to the seminar classes, the online classes just fell flat. Graduate history classes, though, are some of the most fun I've experienced. Its you and 8 people in a room, analyzing a book and debating about historical significance for a good 3 hours. Loads of fun.
At the time, I was mulling becoming some manner of classicist: That required four languages, in Archaic Greek, Latin, French, and German, which just wasn't going to happen. Alas, I opted to go to law school when I decided that a Ph.D in history wasn't in the cards. And it's going to be a long time before I have it in me to return to the classroom. So I'll content myself with an entirely too long reading list and be glad to live in these times which allow for a couch potato to study history. (Though why I thought Russia Under the Old Regime was a good idea is beyond me.)
Anyways. Madfox brings up a good point about the role that a mercenary's "home culture" and "Deneith cultureilization" would play in their unit cohesion and morale. That said, anybody play the Total War series? Specifically, Medieval 1 and 2, and Rome? Mercenaries were hella useful there, to 1.) Bolster an army, and 2.) Fill out shortcomings. Thrane is probably going to use mercs for heavy infantry, for example. Breland and Karrnath, I'm not sure what they'd pull mercs for, but i'm sure they could use them to round out. Aundair and Cyre, though, would probably use mercs to bolster their forces because they have such low populations.
I think you and Madfox are spot-on with how Deneith's acculturation handles the second-order effects that plague the historical use of mercenaries -- i.e. their propensity to loot and plunder the countryside while on the march -- and, more generally, adequately encapsulate how the canon seems to portray the mercenary trade. That said, I couched this question in the context of the type of big armies, with all the corollaries attached thereto, which is emphatically not supported by the sourcebooks.
Loyalty to the regiment and, by extension House Deneith, is actually the problem with using mercenaries in this context. Once you get to the point where you're raising and agglomorating army-level formations, in order for mercenaries to remain an important part of the picture you need a lot of them: If a modest 25% of your million-man army if composed of mercenaries, one out of every four of your men is going to owe his allegiance not to you, but to House Deneith. This is something that's going to make most states uneasy, even assuming if the mercenaries fight to the ideal of the client combatant. The odds of such ideal fighting seem slim, however, due to the incentive structure Deneith would have: It'd be in Deneith's commanders to be cautious and most concerned with force protection, as it's horrid for business to one's own forces needlessly attrited, and the presumable byproduct of that would be a natural willfulness in terms of following the orders of the client combatant, especially those orders that a Deneith commander might take issue with. It's bad enough when the officers you can court-martial are headstrong in the use of their discretion: It's even worse when the incentive structure guarantees that the commanders of your mercenaries will probably consider it their job to provide a second opinion on the implenetation of your battle plans. And all of this doesn't even touch on the issue of the Korth Edicts: In a Last War featuring large armies, at what point does Deneith start undermining the spirit of them through its mobilization of large formations that're loyal, at the end of the day, to it and no else? Ultimately, something has to give: I think, when the dust settles, the best choice is for the notion of large numbers (i.e. the above 25% figure or greater) of mercenaries serving in line formations for the major combatants.
This somewhat misses the point: A civilization's age has little bearing on the efficacy of its warfighting methodology. Were that the case, our military vernacular would be dotted with Chinese, Hindi, and Farsi idioms for various modern military tools and techniques, rather than vice-versa.
Well, we still use and quote the Art of War (although to be honest, I am not sure how important that work is in military strategic training) ;) Mind you, it is a bit hard to compare Eberron to these examples. These three ancient cultures did not have the same technological and social advancements as our modern Western inlfuenced world. Daakani was actually more advanced, especially in regards of war, than modern Eberron.
The plight of the ancient civilizations of the east, upon being confronted by the technical and material superiority of the West in the Nineteenth Century, actually is the point of reference I was using for the tension I had previously described. In Darguun you have the scions of a fallen great empire, yearning to restore what was taken away from them millennia ago. To do that, one has to deal with the fact that human civilization has taken hold in much of the old empire and that, if we are adhering to the type of warfare generally discussed in this thread, is capable of marshalling staggering amounts of men and material to wage its battles. Given that Darguun birthed itself via the mercenary trade, while it possesses an abundant pool of trained soldiers, it lacks the economic base to deploy or equip forces on the scale required and also lacks the non-combat skillset to keep a proper force in the field. The human nations, however, do possess such a base and such a skillset. To be able to give life to the dream of recreating the Dhakaani Empire, Darguun will have to undergo so level of "modernization", which will invariably generate tension due to the forsaking of some elements of tradition to become more "human-like". While I'm a sucker for the old trope that all hobgoblins are samurai, the above is why I've always looked to Meiji Japan as good model for post-war Darguun.
No disagreement here and so does cannon Eberron. The three goblin novels actually go into this were an ancient Daakani artifact threatens to destroy Darguun because of its assumption the world has not changed. Mind you, the conflict is not about using human tactics. The goblins are bit too practical in warfare to care about that and they can always say the Daakani used those same tactics. The conflict is with the way society is organized, and with the actual number of goblins that exists compared to the number of humans.
Valenar faces a different a problem, and that is that the half-elven war clans were essentially steppe nomads. The steppe nomads made good soldiers: Their skills on horseback and with a bow were second-to-none, and that is why we still talk about the Mongols and Tartars to this day. Valenar doubles down on that by overlaying a Sparta-esque warrior culture that guarantees their expertise with their complex racial fighting style. Despite the competencies, however, history has been fairly unkind to the tactics of the steppe nomads, as the history of Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century Russia tell us. I would argue that, in post-war Valenar, one of the major political hot buttons is the necessity of military modernization, due to the steady out-moding of the war clan system by the Last War and the fact that any modernization will require up-ending the war clan system, with all the societal dislocation that'd produce.
Well, they are full elves, and they have support from the Aeranal elves. Still, I don't disagree with this assessment up to a point. I don't think cannon material actual describes the Valenar as being purely horse riders, those are just most often remembered and described for the same reasons the Mongols are. They are a warrior culture whose individuals try to emulate ancient ancesteral warrior whether a horse rider, heavy infantry or assassin. Furthermore, they are not even all that interested in statecraft and the only reason they even managed to conquer a country was due to the Last War. They leave most of the day-to-day ruling to the locals and House Lyrandor. They also face little risk of loosing that land right now because their borders are protected by desert, Mournland and sea. I
don't think there is any political hot buttons, simply because as a culture they do not care. Changing their ways is almost litterally sacriledge. They are way too stuck in the past. Of course, if they ever would face a united human front in any kind of real battle and loose all support from Aeranal they would be quickly beaten. That is what happened when they were kicked out by the goblins the first time (and in way to the Spartans as well, their inability to adapt eventually lead to their downfall).
Ultimately, something has to give: I think, when the dust settles, the best choice is for the notion of large numbers (i.e. the above 25% figure or greater) of mercenaries serving in line formations for the major combatants.
Agreed. Mind you, I never got the impression from cannon material that mercs formed a significant faction of the active armies. They formed an important if not vital role, but that is not the same as being a large group amongst the front lines.
The point being, appeals to canon invalidate much of the current discussion, so I'd say tread lightly in that direction if you will.
Since I have a hard time adding any thoughts that Juums has not already expressed, I'd just like to remind Madfox that the direction of this thread long ago left the realm of "canon". It's a basis for comparison, but the scale of warfare and the strategic environment we're discussing here don't really have any basis in canon at all; this all came about because I concluded that from the published maps, the population density was far too low, and therefore the populations of each of the nations of Khorvaire must be in the millions. Large armies were extrapolated from that, which then lead to the notion of General Staffs, advanced strategic planning, etc...
The point being, appeals to canon invalidate much of the current discussion, so I'd say tread lightly in that direction if you will.
Not even when canon actually validates Juum's position? ;) We stepped away from the discussion on General Staffs and armies size, and looked at cultural impact of those changes. I merely pointed out that by canon the Valenar (the subject were canon somewhat invalidates Juum's position) would actually not want to change, even if it could very well mean their defeat. Their current social/command structure works well regardless of you stick to the more traditional view on army structure or a more modern one. They defeated the Cyreans in a blitzkrieg way while the Cyreans were rather distrcited. A medieval organized army can certainly achieve such short term victories even when facing a more modern organized army, especially if that medieval army is highly disciplined, extremely brave, well trained and equiped with the most modern weapons while their modern organized opponents are ill equipped, likely green and untrained (I sincerely doubt the Cyreans had their regulars posted in Darguun or what is now Valenar, it is not as if goblin raiders and Talenta halflings posed that much of a threat).
Not even when canon actually validates Juum's position? ;) We stepped away from the discussion on General Staffs and armies size, and looked at cultural impact of those changes. I merely pointed out that by canon the Valenar (the subject were canon somewhat invalidates Juum's position) would actually not want to change, even if it could very well mean their defeat. Their current social/command structure works well regardless of you stick to the more traditional view on army structure or a more modern one. They defeated the Cyreans in a blitzkrieg way while the Cyreans were rather distrcited. A medieval organized army can certainly achieve such short term victories even when facing a more modern organized army, especially if that medieval army is highly disciplined, extremely brave, well trained and equiped with the most modern weapons while their modern organized opponents are ill equipped, likely green and untrained (I sincerely doubt the Cyreans had their regulars posted in Darguun or what is now Valenar, it is not as if goblin raiders and Talenta halflings posed that much of a threat).
I didn't mean to avoid discussions of canon altogether, only that it should be tread lightly since we've already acknowledged that we've strayed very far from it.
But I don't necessarily disagree with your conclusions, though.
Well, we still use and quote the Art of War (although to be honest, I am not sure how important that work is in military strategic training) ;) Mind you, it is a bit hard to compare Eberron to these examples. These three ancient cultures did not have the same technological and social advancements as our modern Western inlfuenced world. Daakani was actually more advanced, especially in regards of war, than modern Eberron.
Baked into the cake of this thread is the assumption that magic is technology. Which is odd, given that Mr. Baker is on the record as saying that's emphatically not the point of Eberron, and it's a point I agree with. But since magic is used as a substitute for technology, as we've illustrated previously with the various magical analogues to real-world technical innovations, then it stands to reason that the knock-on effects of those analogues roughly track with those we've witnessed historically. What you get, then, is the development of a societal model in the Five Nations that benefits from at least some of the "technological and social advancements" which transformed the West starting with the Renaissance or Enlightenment, depending upon your tastes. Once you get a Western analogue, in the form of the Five Nations, you invariably breed analogues of the various non-Western powers that were subject to all manner of rude awakenings in the Seventeenth, Eighteenth, and Ninteenth Centuries: The marginal areas of the pre-war Five Nations serve that purpose well-enough.
Modern goblinoid statehood began in the 870s A.K. when House Deneith first started bringing mercenary clans out of the squalor of the Seawall Mountains. Those goblins who have an interest in intellectualism of any sort will almost invariably be intellectual progeny of the Five Nations: The large bulk of formal learning that the average goblinoid who ventures out of its clan's enclave is going to get will come through the process of making a mercenary out of him, delivered either by House Deneith or a goblinoid drill instructor trained by House Deneith. This is not a particularly new phenomenon: It is well-attested to that NCOs were transmitters of imported military concepts, and the cultural biases that support and gave rise to them, amongst the various modernization and self-strenghtening movements in the non-Western world of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries. The tension between modernity, as embodied by the Five Nations, and the past comes from the existence of the Heirs of Dhakaan. The Heirs of Dhakaan transform the rebuilding of Dhakaan from a nationalistic rallying cry to actual blueprint: It's not about building a national home for goblinkind but re-establishing a specific style of state. It would be as if, when Serbia gained independence in 1815, an organization with a lineal connection to the pre-1389 Kingdom of Serbia emerged from hiding and made the restoration of the feudal monarchy a goal of the state. While the Heirs of Dhakaan cannot agree who is the proper heir to the throne of the empire, it is a reasonable assumption they will not be enthused by the impulse amongst the clans that have done tours of duty beyond modern Darguun to adopt the institutions, military or otherwise, of the Five Nations. (And can you blame them? They've spent three hundred and sixty generations sitting in caves preserving the superiority of Dhakaan.)
I think there's good hay to be made of tension between the idea of Darguun as a goblinized member of the community of nations whose cultural derives from that of Galifar and the idea of Darguun as the stepping stone for the resurrection of all things Dhakaani. Within that particular sphere is the dominion of military affairs. Your mileage in appreciating the idea may, and probably will, vary.
No disagreement here and so does cannon Eberron. The three goblin novels actually go into this were an ancient Daakani artifact threatens to destroy Darguun because of its assumption the world has not changed. Mind you, the conflict is not about using human tactics. The goblins are bit too practical in warfare to care about that and they can always say the Daakani used those same tactics. The conflict is with the way society is organized, and with the actual number of goblins that exists compared to the number of humans.
I feel obliged to note that all things military are, in no small part, culturally derived. This is why importation of Western arms, force structure, and tactics was always such a hit-and-miss affair in the Orient and elsewhere: The powers that be were very much interested in Western warmaking, but not much interested in anything else. This was problematic, because such things evolved out of the qualities that were assumed to be present in the average Western soldier. To use an example, the militaries of the West employ very powerful NCOs compared to much of the rest of the world, devolving a good deal of authority that is typically held by officers to them. While we can argue about its precise origin, it can generally be attributed to an expectation of initiative-taking and good faith dealing bred by rearing in a market economy. If such a force structure were ported over to a society with no grounding in such, like those found in a command economy of the Soviet model, then it is inevitable there will be teething problems. The same, incidentally, applies to tactics: The West's wealth and democracy-bred casualty aversion have been the drivers of the adoption and deployment of ever more capital-intensive force multipliers so as to minimalize as much as is humanely possible the exposure of its troops to death while under fire.
That's enough blathering about the real world. Time to drag this back to Eberron. Another baked in assumption of everything I've mentioned is that the military culture of the modern Five Nations is basically Western. With that in mind, it means there's a trend and impulse to devolve authority within the militaries of the Five Nations and, as House Denith is human, the primary employer of goblinoid mercenaries. Traditional goblinoid culture presumably resists such trends: In most of the clans, after all, the strong dominate the weak through the exercise of physical force, which does not seem conducive to entrusting your subordinates to take the initiative on your behalf. In the evolving Darguul state, then, there's bound to be some acrimony arising from this: Either you are going to strain the bonds of the traditional clan structure in most places as there will invariably be members of the "weak" who pursue a career in an army led by Deneith-accultured officers who will come back home with all sorts of ideas the "strong" do not like, or you curtail your efficacy by foregoing the methodologies imbued in your core of Deneith-trained veterans for an organizational structure more attuned to the traditional power structures of the clans. If one opts to preserve the efficacy imbued by all of the goblin-years spent plying the mercenary trade, then some amount of cultural "modernization" is required to make the bulk of the clans more conducive to the way of warfare imbibed from the Five Nations. Doing this, however, basically means up-ending the basic unit of goblinoid political organization, one that has dominated since prior to the Dhakaani Empire. And why? To better adopt the ways of the humans.
In short: Yes, it is about the adoption of human tactics. (And, by extension, human military strictures.) No matter how practical the goblinoids are in warfare, adopting such tactics clashes horribly with the culture of military affairs that has permeated the goblinoids since the fall of the Dhakaani Empire: Cherry-picking only those parts with no teething issues will result in relatively little gain, while adopting them wholesale is going to be massively dislocative culturally, especially for a state built on nationalism.
Valenar faces a different a problem, and that is that the half-elven war clans were essentially steppe nomads.
I derp the herps real gewd, yes I do. Mea culpa for that oversight.
Well, they are full elves, and they have support from the Aeranal elves. Still, I don't disagree with this assessment up to a point. I don't think cannon material actual describes the Valenar as being purely horse riders, those are just most often remembered and described for the same reasons the Mongols are. They are a warrior culture whose individuals try to emulate ancient ancesteral warrior whether a horse rider, heavy infantry or assassin.
I did not mean to imply that they were purely cavalrymen, as my statement about them being given mastery of an exotic racial fighting style was meant to be a nod to the fact that they can cut people up doubleplus good with their double-scimitars. They were full-spectrum warriors and second-to-none in more or less every classical area of single combat. Once more, mea culpa for not making that as clear as it should have been.
Though I feel obliged to wonder how much actual diplomatic support the Aerani actually lend to Valenar. I was under the impression that the Valaes Tairn were basically Tairnadal wildcatters, who set out in the unknown while the bulk of Aeranal just shrugged and went back to the day-to-day business of tending to an undead pantheon or keeping a lookout for dragons on the horizon.
Furthermore, they are not even all that interested in statecraft and the only reason they even managed to conquer a country was due to the Last War. They leave most of the day-to-day ruling to the locals and House Lyrandor. They also face little risk of loosing that land right now because their borders are protected by desert, Mournland and sea. I don't think there is any political hot buttons, simply because as a culture they do not care. Changing their ways is almost litterally sacriledge. They are way too stuck in the past. Of course, if they ever would face a united human front in any kind of real battle and loose all support from Aeranal they would be quickly beaten. That is what happened when they were kicked out by the goblins the first time (and in way to the Spartans as well, their inability to adapt eventually lead to their downfall).
You've actually more or less sketched out why there would invariably be a hot-button political conflict. The conflict would be between the war clans and the politicos they delegate running Valenar to. It is the job of the politicos, who constitute the real government of Valenar, to provide for the long-term common defense of the nation: And they must be acutely aware of how tenuous the nation's independence is, for as you said, Valenar's independence was secured only by the fact that Cyre's strategic disposition meant it could not actively contest the creation of the Valenar state. And while geography provides the nation robust frontiers, such will only slow rather that deter would-be attackers due to Valenar's inability to make a major stand along them: The war clans are politically unreliable in that they cannot be made to fight when and where they are needed, and operationally ineffectual due to the fact that no matter how skilled the individual Valenar elf is with a blade or bow, he will be overmatched by the mass of firepower brought to bear against him, and there are not enough elves to counteract the material advantages of a major power. What the politicos want is a regular army of the sort found darn near everywhere else in Khorvaire, that is composed of standing units which are maintained by and loyal to the government. The problem is that Valenar lacks the demography to create such without the participation of the war clans, even assuming the war clans were willing to give up their monopoly on force in the first place. And war clan participation is in all likelihood a non-starter, as it'd involve the sacrilege of abandoning the old ways to the point of essentially abolish the clan system. So you are left with massive friction between what the politicos who actually run the day-to-day affairs of Valenar feel is required and what the nominal rules of the state feel is acceptable.
I was reading Forge of War on the can not too long ago, and I looked at the descriptions of tactics by each country. Sure, Forge of War may be....Forge of War, but I was somewhat surprised by the amount of "agile" forces. Aundair, expectedly, was "agile", as was Cyre (when not bolstered by mercs). However, the one that surprised me was....Breland. According to FoW, Breland uses mobility and attacks from ambush.
Now, to me, that says that the Five Nations lost or forgot their capability for large-scale operations, with their armies effectively being relegated to a constabulary role and defense against raiders, bandits, and the like. That is why Cyre, Aundair, and Breland all rely on mobility; to catch and kill raiders and bandits.
Thrane and Karrnath are both described as being "heavy" armies, as in, massed troops hammering away. However, Thrane can still fit the paradigm of operations against bandits. While Thrane has been described as using masses of peasant levies, they would only be raised in wartime. During peace, Thranish knights and Silver Flame templars would be the ones to hunt down bandidos. As for Karrnath, well, they can either be the sole repository of a staff system, or they can just crush bandits with the application of manpower.
Thinking about it, you could also prolly, before the Last War, hire Deneith mercs for counter bandit work.
In any case. So, currently, we've figured out that Khorvaire has one of three types of staff system (correct me if I'm wrong):
1.) A nonexistant one;
2.) A nonexistant one at the start of the Last War, with all of the nations developing some manner of a staff system as the war went on;
3.) An extant staff system implimented by the Galifaran state before the Last War that was fragmented by nationalism, and compromised in all nations by political problems.
Personally, I've always assumed 2. I always liked the idea that warfare had been virtually unknown on Khorvaire for the entire time that Galifar was a single state, and therefore much of "modern" warfare was invented during the Last War.
Threadcromancy!
Nope. I'm done with this thread. It's already eaten up many thousands of words of mine on all manner of things and I'm not going to give it the chance to suck any more bone from my marrow. Not gonna happen. No chance in the Nine Hells. Ain't going to come to that.
...DAMNIT, it's come to that.
Now, to me, that says that the Five Nations lost or forgot their capability for large-scale operations, with their armies effectively being relegated to a constabulary role and defense against raiders, bandits, and the like. That is why Cyre, Aundair, and Breland all rely on mobility; to catch and kill raiders and bandits.
Thrane and Karrnath are both described as being "heavy" armies, as in, massed troops hammering away. However, Thrane can still fit the paradigm of operations against bandits. While Thrane has been described as using masses of peasant levies, they would only be raised in wartime. During peace, Thranish knights and Silver Flame templars would be the ones to hunt down bandidos. As for Karrnath, well, they can either be the sole repository of a staff system, or they can just crush bandits with the application of manpower.
Allow me to disagree and offer a couple of different, less pessimistic interpretations of the notion of "agile" armies, Ogiwan. As while I think the idea of the constabulary army is one that doesn't get nearly enough play or respect, I think that it's out of place here, as we usually do want at least somewhat massive armies conducting high-intensity operations for the entirety of the Last War. The thematics tend to get detracted from if we don't.
In the first interpretation, operational agility in this context does not stem from the loss of the ability to conduct large-scale operations, but of mastery over them. It is, in many ways, akin to the fetishization of airborne rapid reaction forces by the West in the post-Cold War period: To leverage the sophistication of network-centric warfare and materials science to offer the firepower of a sixty-ton vehicle in a platform that could be deployed out of the rear of a C-130, and apply that procurement methodology to unit organization. For all of the delusions poured into the Future Combat System and Future Rapid Effects System, nobody really doubted that the U.S. and Great Britain had the ability to project massive amounts of power overseas or conduct large-scale operations. (Ironically, it was the practical demonstration of these capabilities during Operation Iraqi Freedom that sounded the death knell, at least conceptually, for FRES and the original FCS.) In short, it was only because of their total certainty in their ability to conduct large-scale conventional operations that the Anglosphere was capable of obsessing over the kitting out of "agile" RRFs and the like. Transplanting such logic to Eberron, it was only because of their mastery of the fundamentals of large-scale operations -- usually relating to arcana -- that they could afford to invest scarce resources in enhancing operational agility. I would say this generally tracks with well with the shown utilization of magic as a force multiplier, and it also provides another sound reason why Karrnath didn't just steamroll everyone with never-ending legions of undead. For as interesting as a nation whose offiers corps is made up of undead and those afflicted with Chronic Backstabber Syndrome can be, I find an inability to master the basics of logistics far, far more plausible to explain their failing to take over the world than an inability to agree on what order to defeat the rest of the Five Nations.
A second alternative is a far more blase and less generous to the martial skills of Aundair, Cyre, and Breland. Though it is also rather more plausible and doesn't really require reading the sorts of assumptions that have been read in throughout this entire thread. To wit, Aundair, Cyre, and Breland are all in some measure casualty averse: Aundair's aversion to battlefield deaths owes to its status as the most feudal and aristocratic of the Five Nations, with battlefield losses inordinately falling onto the shoulders of nation's most educated, affluent, and politically powerful families; Cyre's stems from its demographic precariousness and the balancing act required to fill army billets without depriving the productive sectors of the economy with producers; and Breland's due to the fact that its leaders are the most subordinated in the Five Nations to their governed, who -- as the history of democratic powers going to war have shown -- tend to become restless and irritated as body counts rise. Such dispositions would, presumably, lead to a preference for what the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century called "wars of maneuver", in which campaigns were fought by positioning and sieges, versus "wars of destruction", in which the enemy's army is actively sought out and destroyed. By contrast, Thrane and Karrnath seem to be fairly casualty insensitive: For the Thranes, there're always more zealous levies to be found, while Karrnath is content enough to allow fallen patriots to serve their country twice. Such would seem to provide sufficient justification for assembling massive, plodding armies and pointing them towards their objective to batter it into submission.
Thinking about it, you could also prolly, before the Last War, hire Deneith mercs for counter bandit work.
Really, during the Last War, this is the type of work that I've always thought should characterize Deneith's wartime activities, at least if you're using the types of big populations and large armies they produce that we've pondered in this thread. I've rolled a game where the term "blademark" is used in the same way that, in the real world, the word "gendarme" is: The history of such stems from the more volatile days of the early Last War, where there were broad exchanges of territory, and a paramilitary-trained and politically reliable constabulary was required in those territories that would also not alienate the residents. The international nature of the Blademarks, as well as the fact that they House Deneith was an institution with an unquestionable pedigree, provided badly needed legitimacy for provision of basic law-and-order in places like Old Breland, Thaliost, and the vast swathes of western Thrane occupied by Aundair during the war.
In any case. So, currently, we've figured out that Khorvaire has one of three types of staff system (correct me if I'm wrong):
1.) A nonexistant one;
2.) A nonexistant one at the start of the Last War, with all of the nations developing some manner of a staff system as the war went on;
3.) An extant staff system implimented by the Galifaran state before the Last War that was fragmented by nationalism, and compromised in all nations by political problems.
I'd say there needs to be an Option #4, which is some combination of #2 and #3.
I'm also not entirely sure what you mean by "compromised in all nations by political problems". Is it that each staff, as it evolved, came to occupy a particular niche within the distinct political structures that grew up in the Five Nations? That's true of every general staff in the modern world, though: The Great German General Staff occupied a weird power-sharing place with the Military Cabinet and Minister of War, the French General Staff was nominally subservient to the prime minister and Minister of War until war actually broke out and the chief of staff was a god-king within the Zone of the Armies, while the British General Staff was integrated into the larger security framework of the Committee for Imperial Defense. Or do you mean that the efficacy of each staff was, in due time, effaced by political turmoil? History gave us plenty of examples of that in WW1, too: The Great General Staff constantly ran into trouble for trying to run its own war due to the utter insanity of Prussian constitutionalism, and all of that was before the Easterner vs. Westerner conflict; STAVKA attempted to run its war by committee, with the Northwestern and Southwestern Fronts usually being at loggerheads, and the various army chiefs within the Fronts opposing each others' operational plans; the near-omnipotence of the commander-in-chief in the Zone of the Armies caused all manner of political friction in France; and Haig's diaries are littered with references to the unwelcomed political intrusions into his operations coming Lloyd George. I'm just a little confused as to whether being riven with political problems is supposed to be a bad thing, as that's what makes the staffs of Breland, Karrnath, and Thrane so interesting to ponder. (And even to a lesser extent Aundair. I've always run Cyre's staff as being almost Mary Suishly meritocratic and competant, but this is because most of it got blown up during the Mourning.)
There was an Imperial General Staff, which either disintegrated or migrated to one of the Five Nations (Cyre?), then the other Five developed General Staffs of their own as the war progressed.
Is that Eberron-as-is, or Eberron-as-us? I can't remember.
Juums, your point about all the general staffs getting politically compromised is a good one. I stand corrected. Well, sit corrected. In any case, onto something else you've said:
Transplanting such logic to Eberron, it was only because of their mastery of the fundamentals of large-scale operations -- usually relating to arcana -- that they could afford to invest scarce resources in enhancing operational agility. I would say this generally tracks with well with the shown utilization of magic as a force multiplier, and it also provides another sound reason why Karrnath didn't just steamroll everyone with never-ending legions of undead. For as interesting as a nation whose offiers corps is made up of undead and those afflicted with Chronic Backstabber Syndrome can be, I find an inability to master the basics of logistics far, far more plausible to explain their failing to take over the world than an inability to agree on what order to defeat the rest of the Five Nations.
I have to admit that I'm torn about this. The bulk of interpritations we have about Karrnath seem to point towards it developing or having a general staff, one of the primary functions of which is strategic and operational logistics. But, an inability to support and move their armies would explain how they weren't able to monkey-stomp everybody. Perhaps something akin to the Wehrmacht in WWII, which a.) had a logistical system designed to support a 200-mile offense, and b.) didn't have enough motor transport to support its operations? Feel free to expand on your interpritation of the KGS.
To what extent does the Karrnathi reliance on undead troops complicate the matter of General Staff? While raw logistics is less of a problem, how much of the production and command is tied up with the Order of the Emerald Claw, and how autonomously are they from the KGS as a whole? What time and resources are tied up in the actual production process, being a magical ritual. How many commanders are comfortable and competent with leading undead legions?
As to the mobility issue, a previous idea I had for my own take on Eberron (sparked by one of Mr. Baker's own comments on Karrnathi undead here) was that the Karrnathi elite undead were animated by a sort of Karrnathi genius loci - fighting for the Fatherland, homogenized abilities, intelligent, but not quite human. Too far away and they'd "demote" to normal undead. To my knowledge, there was only one ill-fated venture with Karrnathi undead "abroad", in the quickly suppressed sneak attack on Sharn in 991, which would actually work with this hypothesis.
I think you raise a good point with the Emerald Claw and its importance to the raising of undead forces. Thinking about it, the Emerald Claw could be kind of like the SS in Germany in WWII: rediculously powerful, set apart from the conventional forces force structure, and with sweeping political, economic, and security functions. To give you an idea of what I mean, the same structure that "owned" the Waffen SS also owned businesses that made stuff, and also ran the intelligence apparati. Early in the war, the SS had its own military intelligence unit alongside the normal Wehrmacht MI bureau.
Transferred to Eberron, the Emerald Claw may be separate from the KGS, to the point where the EC is the one supplying the KGS with undead when and where the EC feels like it, and other EC units would also operate outside of the chain of command that leads to the KGS (or for that matter, any non-EC Warlord).
Now, doing a little more theorizing on the use of undead units, I think that I would put the Karrnathi undead as a lot rarer than I thought, but with conventional undead being far more common. In terms of tactics, I feel that undead units would lack sufficient command and control to be as reactive as a human unit, hence the development of the Dread Commander. But, again, I think that undead units would be larger and less agile than a conventional unit, which means that the usual operations of an undead formation would be to have conventional undead hammer away at the enemy front lines, and send in Karrnathi undead when a breach is made. Similar in concept to Soviet doctrine, but sans the emphasis on speed on the breakthrough units.
In terms of logistics, sure, a Karrnathi Risen Patriots legion/division/whatever would have a very light logistical tail (even factoring in...repair parts? for the undead), but would not be as flexible, due to the limited command and control. Thinking about it, I guess that would be why Karrnathi units would continue to be mixed living and non-living; the living units would react quicker to enemy maneuvers, whereas the nonliving would apply brute force to the enemy.
Last, good post cite. I don't think I ever read that post by Keith. It certainly made me think.
For Breland. War bears. Charging. 'nough said. Though honestly, I think they probably are somewhat in the middle ground when it comes to army agility, same with Cyre. Cyre has the benefit of more magical devices due to a stronger relationship with House Cannith, but the addition of Warforged later in the war + mercenary forces makes their army a little less mobile (unless you count the Valenar charging around, tearing stuff up).
The Karrni army is clearly going to be a bulky, heavy army because of the nature of their army during the Last War. Zombies tend to be fairly slow and work best in masses. They can afford disasterous, frontline combat because they can just make more zombies, from their dead and the dead of the enemy. By contrast, Thrane relies on religious zealotry to have a strong military base, rather than being able to resurrect the dead. I suspect that they are able to keep soldiers in the fight somewhat longer as well, from healing/morale reasons.
Overall, while social reasoning certainly does carry into how they fight the wars, I think the tactics are also very important to consider. On that note, you do not want to be in one of the battles between Aundair and Karrnath. Being between giant walls of flame and necromancy? That's just not a fun place to be.